Author: Nils Rooijmans

Nobody will remember:
– Your salary
– Your fancy Title
– How ‘busy’ you were
– How many hours you worked
– Any of the Google certificates on your wall

People will remember:
– How you spent twice the client’s monthly budget in a single day

Such is agency life.

– Nils

Products in Google Merchant Center get disapproved time and time again for all kinds of reasons.

A common issue is a disapproval because of ‘Mismatched value (page crawl): (price [price])’ 

Even when you have the price info perfectly visualised on your landing page, Google may still sometimes not see your price or see the same price you have in your feed. 

A possible cause that gets overlooked easily: Outdated microdata or HTML.

FIX: Check for contradictory information within your site build, and remove it to eliminate crawling issues using this tool –>
https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

– Nils

Do you know how much Google can charge you when you use ad scheduling to only show ads during the weekdays?

I had to look up the exact details myself today, so I might as well share the answers with you 🙂

First, some definitions and theory.

Your average daily budget:
The average budget amount that you set for each ad campaign on a per-day basis. It specifies how much you are roughly comfortable spending each day over the course of the month.

Your daily spending limit:
The max amount you pay on an individual day.

Your monthly spending limit:
The max amount you pay for the given month.

Your daily spending limit is 2x your average daily budget, because of Google’s disputable over-delivery feature. Your monthly spending limit is 30.4 times your average daily budget (because 30.4 is the average number of days in a month).

Sample scenario:
Let’s say you set a daily budget target of $100 in your campaign settings, and schedule your ads to only show on weekdays (i.e., Monday to Friday). Let’s assume this month has 20 weekdays (4 weeks times 5 days per week).

Now, what happens to your spending limits?

You might expect Google to recalculate your monthly spending limit, to be 20 x $100 = $2000, thus limiting the max amount you pay for the given month to $2000.

Not so!

Ad scheduling does not impact your monthly spending limit and does not impact your daily spending limit. Google will still try to spend 30.4 times your average daily budget on a monthly basis.

In our scenario, this means Google will spend 30.4 x $100 = $3040 per month if the search volume is there and the daily spending limit allows it to. Our daily spending limit is 2 x $100 = $200, which easily allows for an average daily spend of $3040/20 = $152. 

Here’s the thing: If you don’t want to be charged more than $2000 in a given month, you need to recalculate your daily budget target yourself and change it to $2000/30.4 = $65.79.

As you can see, pacing budgets via the daily budget setting is far from easy but also no rocket science. 

This is also something that highly benefits from automation, so be sure to check out these scripts to help you manage your budgets:

https://nilsrooijmans.com/daily-budget-overdelivery-alerts-script/

https://nilsrooijmans.com/top-5-google-ads-scripts-for-budget-management/

– Nils

Fellow list member Jacobo Alonso sent in this question (shared with permission, question paraphrased for clarity):

“Would you keep “Longer ad headlines”? Also, I am not sure how these work.”

Here’s what Google has to say about this form of automated extension:

“Automated extensions can give you more robust ads and more chances to win new customers.

Long text headlines in automated extension is a feature that automatically improves the 
format of text ads, by automatically promoting part of the description lines to the headline, 
and adding the visible URL to the headline, when possible. Longer Ad Headlines may use text 
from both Description Line 1 & 2. If our system can determine a proper sentence can be made, 
it will promote the message to the headline.“

SOURCE: email from a Google Rep.

Would I keep this feature on?

No. 

I don’t have data to back this up, but I simply do not trust Google in being able to really improve the conversion value per impression with this automated extension.

What do you think?

– Nils

Do you know the single most important objective for the client you are working on right now?

Is it an increase in profit?
Revenue growth?
Number of clients?
Brand recognition?

Seriously, do you really know?

My bet: the answer is “No.”

It’s rarely the case the client knows, too. 

It is your job to figure it out together with your client.

Here’s a question you can email to get the conversation started:

“Hey [insert client name], if you had to choose between (A) 10% more profit with the same revenue, or (B) half the profit with 20% more revenue, what would you choose?”

– Nils

ICYMI: Last week, Google added advanced location options for PMax campaigns.

This is BIG if you are interested in using PMax for lead gen.

Not all leads are equal and geography plays a big part in the quality and value of your leads.

Hell, some geo-regions seem to ONLY send junk traffic and lead fraud.

Luckily, we can now limit our ads to only show in the geo-locations we really want to target:

– Nils

PS: Music I am listening to today to get energized -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-rSgNpqPew

PPS: Want a big smile on your face? Watch the YouTube video, these guys loooove what they are doing!

Yesterday, I came across this thread on /r/PPC: 
https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/vwn9bd/issues_with_googles_automated_extensions/

“Google’s Automated Extensions were enabled without knowledge or consent and stole thousands of dollars from our clients”

OUCH!

It reminded me of the fact that I could not create a script to monitor their performance and check if they are turned on or off. Unfortunately, Google Ads Scripts offers no support for automated extensions. We have to check things manually…

Google states:

“Automated extensions can improve the quality of your ad by including information about your business or changing the format of your ad. The Google Ads system includes automated extensions to your text ads when it predicts that the extensions can improve your ad’s performance.“

BUT… I don’t believe them. I’ve seen dynamic sitelinks sending traffic to the worst landers on the planet.

NOTE: Automated extensions are turned on by default.

Personally, by default, I like to turn them off (with the exception of seller ratings). Here’s how you can do this too:

1. Click Ads & extensions in the page menu, then click Extensions in the subpage menu.
2. Click Automated Extensions at the bottom of the page.
3. Click the three-dot menu on the right, then select Advanced options.
4. Select Turn off specific automated extensions and choose which extension to turn off.
5. Select your reason for turning off the extension and add additional comments.
6. Click Turn off.

How about you? Do you turn them off, or leave them on? I’m curious to learn, you can let me know at nils@nilsrooijmans.com.

– Nils

Performance Max is a different beast with different specifications.

As with all things new, it’s not easy to memorize all the details when you get started.

Here’s a nice simple overview of the different asset specifications for PMax campaigns, taken from the Google Ads API developer documentation:

SOURCE: https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/performance-max/assets

– Nils

The Kawasaki Z900 is an amazing bike. 

No-frills, bare-bones sport riding. 

I just got back from my vacation, trying to tame the Z900 in the Colorado Rocky mountains. What a blast!

Me and my buddies visit the US every year just for that. There’s no comparison between the US and Europe when it comes to  road tripping.  

We’ve been to Colorado before (a couple of times actually) and my buddy was a bit nervous; he “forgot” to pay his fine for the speeding ticket from one of our previous adventures. His “past violation” haunted him for the whole duration of our trip.

Which brings me to today’s topic. 

Before my vacation, we talked about “past violations” and how Google continues to not show ads that it had mistakenly disapproved in the past.

Here’s the thing: unless you notice “past violations” in your ads and take action, these ads will continue to not show.

I made a promise to create a script to alert you on any ad that has the status of being disapproved for “past violations,” so you can take action. Thanks to the help of many list members, the script is finally finished.

Here it is: https://nilsrooijmans.com/google-ads-script-past-violations-alert/

Thanks again to all of you who helped me test and fine-tune the code.

Happy scripting!

– Nils

As of April 2022, Google Ad Editor supports the creation and editing of Performance Max campaigns (version 2.0 and up).

This is all good and well, but there’s a sneaky little bug: if you copy-paste a PMax campaign that has Final URL expansion set to ‘Only send traffic to the URLs you’ve provided’, the copy will have this option set to the default ‘Send traffic to the most relevant URLs on your site’.

To fix this, you’ll need to go into the Google Ads interface and change this campaign setting manually.

H/T to Lyubomir Popov for pointing this out.

– Nils

Fellow list member Simonetta Azzarito sent in this question (shared with permission, question paraphrased for clarity):

“I am searching for a script that produces a Google Sheet with customized report for the auction insights for specific keywords. Can you help me?”

Auction Insights are subject to many questions amongst script kiddies. The BAD NEWS is, they are not supported via scripts!

Currently, there is no way to use Google Ads Scripts or the Report API to get the auction data from our accounts. (Believe me, I’ve tried it. Many times. Even more times than I tried to bench press a 100kg. Failed every time…)

Hopefully, Google will add support for auction insights data in the near future, but I wouldn’t place my bets on it.

That being said, I do have some tips on how to make life a little bit easier if you find yourself spending countless hours downloading auctions insights via the Google Ads interface.

1. Schedule downloads via scheduled reports:

2. Visualise the auction insights data via Optmyzr’s Auction Insights Visualizer. Here’s a nice short video by Frederick Vallaeys that demos this free tool -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgycHrR5diU

3. Automatically store auction insights data in Big Query. This one is for automation daredevils, but definitely a great solution to circumvent Google Ads scripts’ limitations: Stefan Neefischer’s solution that uses Cloud Functions and Cloud Storage to scrape and store your data. Here’s a link: https://www.pemavor.com/how-to-pull-google-auction-insight-data-in-an-automated-way/

Now, I am off to my gym for my bench press challenge. 🙂

Enjoy the weekend!

– Nils

– Nils

I got approached for this today:

– Nils

Looking for some creative inspiration for your next ad copy?

Or maybe you’re just curious about what copy your competitors are using?

If so, here’s a Chrome extension I discovered just today, and I am already in love with it. It scrapes text ads and related keywords from the Google SERP. You can then download the aggregated data as an Excel file. The file will contain all your competitors’ headlines and descriptions in one single sheet!

PRO TIP: 
1) Conduct searches for the top 10 or top 20 related keywords
2) Download the scraped data in your Excel sheet
3) Copy-paste all your competitors’ headlines in a single text file and feed it to an n-gram analyzer like http://guidetodatamining.com/ngramAnalyzer/ 

This will give you some great insights you can use to create and test some ads!

Here’s the link to the Chrome extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ppc-ad-editor-adminer%C2%AE/omhnpaidepkhbjngmhjkphmlofoiocna

“Beter goed gejat, dan slecht bedacht!” (A Dutch proverb.)

– Nils

I just got back from a trip to France, enjoying the Champagne region and its lovely drink. Or drinkSSS, I might better say… 😉

For some reason, this afternoon, my brain wasn’t yet ready to come up with some new callout extensions to test in one of my accounts. (Them bubbles…)

So I did what I normally do in such situations: ask Google for help.

Here’s a list with some creative examples that showed up in the result and could benefit you as well:

Ecommerce

Attractive & Affordable 
    Guaranteed Satisfaction 
    30% Off Clearance Items
    Customization leader 
    1-2 day shipping
    Free shipping
    Over 250,000 Team Items 
    Officially Licensed Gear 
    Satisfaction Guarantee
    Spring Arrivals are Here 
    Shop Best Sellers 
    Top Designer Collections
    Price Matching

Service Industry

    Workmanship Guaranteed 
    Upfront Pricing 
    Licensed Plumbing Experts
    Trusted For 67 Years 
    Local Plumbers Since 1947 
    Always Available 24/7
    Electrical Experts 
    Local Service 
    Fast Response 
    Affordable Pricing
    Save $350 Before Dec. 25
    Financing Available
    Liposuction Specialists
    History of Results 
    20yrs Combined Experience
    Handle Complex Cases
    No Service Fees

Accommodations
    
    Free Cancellation 
    24/7 Customer Service 
    Read Real Guest Reviews
    Save Time and Money 
    700,000+ Hotels Worldwide
    No Ads or Pop-ups
    Best Price Guarantee 
    11+ Million Hotel Reviews 
    No Change or Cancel Fees
    Over 300,000 Rentals 
    Listings in 190 Countries
    1,000,000 Unique Listings
    24/7 Customer Service
    Insurance Up to $10,000 
    Peace of Mind Guarantee
    Pet Friendly Rentals 
    Homes with Private Pools 
    Oceanfront Rentals

Insurance

    Multiple policy discount
    Many discount offerings 
    Switch and save $498/year
    Save up to 40%
    Free online quotes
    24/7 service
    Local agents
    Fast, Easy Payments
    State Minimum Rates 
    Free Quote in Minutes
    75+ Years of Savings 
    Free Quotes 
    24/7 Service & Claims 
    Mobile App
    Live Reps to Assist 
    Save on Average $540 
    Quotes in 5 Mins. or Less

Software

    No Strings Attached 
    Where Work Gets Done 
    Easy to Use 
    Make Things Easy
    Easy To Use 
    Trusted By Over 5,000,000 
    Collaborate Online 
    Try It Free
    World class support 
    Deliver projects on time 
    Portfolio management
    Over 10 Million Users 
    Best Way to Manage Social 
    All-In-One Social Tool
    Listen, Engage & Publish 
    Collaborate at Scale
    Unbeatable Value 
    Everything is Hosted 
    Pay As You Go 
    Easily Customizable
    Free Product Tours 
    100% Cloud Platform 
    Real-Time Data
    Save time billing 
    Easy to use 
    Work anywhere 
    Free trial
    6 Million Users Worldwide  
    Auto Syncs Across Devices
    Complete Security 
    Connect on any device 
    Flexible plans

SOURCE: https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/rr29cm/name_the_google_ads_extensions_that_you_use/

ACTION: Why not test 4 new callouts in your account today? It only takes a few minutes!

– Nils

Our friends from PPCsurvey.com have released their “State of PPC Global Report for 2022.” It reports insights from more than 500 PPC specialists, surveyed around the globe, on a broad range of topics. 

One paragraph that particularly caught my attention describes adoption of automation in Google Ads (paragraph 4.2):

“We see that 68% of PPC specialists use scripts. While that is a majority, it also means that nearly one in three specialists aren’t using any scripts. With 400 free scripts available online, there should be something for everyone to copy, paste, and adjust to their needs.”

I couldn’t agree more. 🙂 

The report also has some nice confirmation for us scripts fanatics. The survey asked specialists how satisfied they were with using different forms of automation. Below, they’re ranked from the lowest dissatisfaction score to the highest:

Using scripts is the top satisfying form of automation in PPC!

No surprise here 😉

ACTION: If you want to learn what you can do to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the latest PPC topics -> grab your free copy of the report on PPCsurvey.com. 

Trust me, it’s great company for your next lunch break.

– Nils

Do you want to pay less for existing customers?

If so, good news: Google’s Smart Shopping campaigns now allow you to prioritize _new_ customer acquisition over selling products to existing customers.

This feature will be available for Performance Max campaigns as well, sometime in the next few months.

If you’re new to this feature, be sure to check it out: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9918441?hl=en

Today, I noticed a Conversion action setting that you need to change to help Google discriminate between existing customers and new customers.

Go to Conversions > Settings and change these settings:

You can select any audience from the Audience Manager — i.e., you can upload a Customer Match list of your existing customers and then select the list.

So, if you are running Smart Shopping and want to prioritize _new_ customer acquisition over selling products to existing customers, change these settings now. It only takes 5 minutes!

– Nils

PS: Beware of the inflated conversion value of the new customers if you use this feature. More entertaining thoughts on this by our friend PPC Kirk -> https://zatomarketing.com/blog/read-before-using-new-customer-acquisition-in-google-smart-shopping-campaigns

This morning, I stumbled upon a small and slightly-hidden ‘new’ feature in Google Ads. It’s not really new, but then I realised it is not widely adopted either, so why not share it with you?

Dynamic Image Extensions

I’ve been testing image extensions for a while now and recommend you do the same. You can expect a higher CTR because an image is better at grabbing a searcher’s attention.

In theory, it could also reduce the number of clicks that go to (organic) competitors, since the ad with the image extension takes up more real estate on the Google SERP.

In my A/B tests, the campaigns with image extensions almost always show higher CTRs, where conversion rates stay the same or are slightly lower. In most cases, this results in a small increase in the number of conversions at similar CPAs. Who doesn’t want that?

As always, YMMV, but if you haven’t considered testing image extension yet, this feature might be of interest to you.

It only takes 5 minutes to set up a test!

More details from Google:
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9566341?hl=en 
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10109688?hl=en

If you are already using image extensions, how are they working out for you? I’d love to know. You can email me at nils@nilsrooijmans.com. 🙂

– Nils

Do you want to improve the performance of your Broad Match keywords?

Think about the countless times you’ve looked at your search term reports only to discover how badly Google is matching user queries to your broad keywords. (I mean, really, “leather handbag” being the same as a leather wallet?! Come on Google…)

Still, sometimes broad match does work like magic. I remember one of my clients had gone through a rebranding, with the new brand name being completely different from the old brand name. Google’s broad match was able to match search terms containing the new brand to the old brand keywords. Pretty impressive.

Imagine being able to reap the benefits of Broad Match without a lot of irrelevant search terms showing up in your reports.

Here’s a tactic that will help you reduce the number of irrelevant clicks from broad match keywords: add converting search terms as new keywords to the ad group that generated the conversion. (*)

Why does this work? Well, according to Google, “Broad Match is able to leverage unique signals not available in other Match types.” These signals include other keywords in your ad group.

SOURCE: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/apl_strategic_recommendations_with_optiscore_aar.pdf

(*) In case you’re wondering: yes, I use scripts to do this for me. 🙂

– Nils