You’re Doing Digital Ads Wrong

Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.  

Stu Eddins:  Welcome to the did I say that out loud podcast, yet another installment and Stamats’ ongoing series of conversations between Mariah and myself. 

Mariah Tang: This legacy of awesomeness.  

Stu Eddins: Hey, you know, it’s a fun job, and somebody gets to do it. The today’s topic is going to be about, you’re doing digital advertising wrong. And, in fact, this is such a common topic. This is just part one. There will probably be a part two and three. I, for heaven’s sake, hope we don’t get up to Part 12. Quite possible with us. You just never know. What I’m going to bring up today are the three things, three most common things we see when we take over an existing ad account. 

Yeah, there’s a lot of variability when you’re talking about a Bing or a Google Ads account, particularly when you’re dealing in those platforms. The language in the instructions, it’s not ambiguous, but it can use words that just don’t seem to go together. And it’s not that it’s unclear. You just have to be somewhat grounded in what it is that the platforms are talking about. But with that said, I’m going to start with the three most common things that go wrong or probably are set up incorrectly in the accounts we take over. Are these the things that I hear you going, what the Yeah? My gosh, yeah. These are the face palm moments sometimes, but sometimes they’re buried. They’re important settings that can be buried more than just a couple clicks into the interface. These are the things that are that face palm moment.  

But again, on one hand, if somebody is new to setting up their account and their campaigns, you might understand the the oversight, but we’re seeing this in campaigns that we take over from other agencies, so you got to pay attention, maybe ask some questions to make sure that your campaigns are set up correctly. Now I’m not suggesting that you just dive into the next meeting and hold their feet to the fire. As fun as that might sound, it’s really not for a relationship going.  

Mariah Tang: But as much as Google’s changed their interfaces, so much like just thinking about GA four, I you know, I used to know how to go in and find what I need, and now I have no idea. So it’s like this is not dumping on any of our clients and friends. It is helping you understand what questions to be asking.  

Stu Eddins: Sure, but however, do rest assured that if we see you still doing this after we talk about it, we will point and laugh at you. Hand slaps. Yeah. Okay, so here is probably the number one thing we see going on, not controlling branded searches. This is really, really big. When we’re dealing with search campaigns, we’re very able to either target or avoid branded search now let’s think about this. In some cases, you do want to target your brand name in a search query, but you probably just don’t want to target your brand name only. You got to ride kind of a fine line. Here it is. A tightrope walking act between the notion of getting found for your brand name by organic links and not having to pay for it, or defense of your brand name because other advertisers are targeting it.  

So there’s a fine line to walk here, and you do have to occasionally dip into the branded bucket to serve ads, but what we see time and time again are accounts where the conversion numbers are really high. They look great. The cost per conversion is low. We’ve got nothing but, but hallelujahs, tinsels and happy noises everywhere. It’s a wonderful thing, but when we look at the search query report, 90% of the conversions are coming from a search that included the brand name. 

You’ve got to pay attention to this stuff is that a search for which you would have served the top five links organically anyway? If so, why are you paying for that? Can you give an example of that? And maybe this won’t make the cut, but sure, just for my understanding, sure. So what I’m talking about is, generally, with search, we’re looking for a a campaign that is going to do one of two things. It’s either going to seal the deal. It does tend to be a bottom of the funnel activity, the lower part of the middle sometimes, depending on what you’re going to try to attract somebody who just needs more information, or somebody ready to commit. Give me more information about this school program, about this procedure, about whatever it might be in healthcare. Or I want to become a student. I want to become a patient.  

Say, I want to commit. I want to purchase. The very bottom of the funnel, we’re either trying to get ourselves inserted into the conversation by interruption. They’re searching for stuff that we offer, that maybe they’re already showing some commitment to somebody else, and our ad acts as an interruptive agent. We step into the conversation. We give them an offer that’s enticing. We give them the reason to look at us. 

The other thing is we want to be in that mid funnel space, kind of the the Learn More space, the the assistive process of making a decision. We want to step in and and be part of the multiple touches people have before they make up their mind. Because really, when it comes down to it, very few decisions are off the cuff, spur of the moment. Heck, I saw that ad I want to buy that commit to that do that. It’s just not the way people behave, especially in higher ed and healthcare, right, right? But the other, the other side of this point is, if this is going on, you’ve got some pretty gaudy conversion numbers. Your cost per conversion is really low. Your cost per click really low. All the metrics that indicate cost low, all the metrics that indicate success high, your conversions, your click through, rate, your time on page all these things. It’s a positive feedback from beginning to end.  

Mariah Tang: In healthcare, we’d call that a false positive.  

Stu Eddins: False positive. Yeah, it is. You would, you would still get the same positive without the ad. Odds are you would still get the same positive without the ad. They’d click on your organic link. Here are a couple things you got to do. You got to decide what the purpose is of your campaign. Are you? Are you wanting to talk to people who are already considering you, who are already committed enough to type in your brand name into the search? Or do you have other methods that take care of that? Do you have really good content that’s going to come up in search and say, hey, here we are. Click on it. Click on our organic link. We’ve got the information you need right here. 

Or are you concerned that that you don’t have good content? You need that constructive landing page to do the convincing, because your organic content, even though you’d rank for that particular search, it isn’t all that hot. 

Or, you know, because Google ads will tell you that your competitors are bidding on your brand name. Now you’ve got to go in there. You’ve got to look at the actual user queries that are generating clicks and conversions. You need to do that. You need to stay on top of that. Whether you’re doing your own advertising or you have a vendor like us doing it for you. That needs to be part of the conversation, maybe not monthly, maybe quarterly, but it’s something that needs to be looked at for optimization purposes. We’re doing it daily, weekly level, but for the conversation and reporting monthly, maybe maybe quarterly. Just depends on how rough and down everything is. But you also have to have an understanding of what the objective is. Are you looking for prospects, new people who don’t know you? Are you looking to grow your engagement with people in the community? Are you looking to reinforce with people who already know you in the community?  

I would suggest that if your method, if your intention, is to reinforce there are probably less costly ways to do it, you could use display advertising to keep that top of mind, to keep those prospects warm, because decisions take time, unless it’s an urgent care need, unless it’s something that you know, the deadline is next week, people will delay making a decision, even if by a few hours. And in that few hour period, that few days, maybe six weeks, that that period of delay, you need to remain top of mind so that the competitor doesn’t step in and win that bit of mind share, and in fact, you describe doing which is interrupting somebody’s decision path. 

It is competitive in that regard. So this first point, not controlling your branded search, here’s what you do. Pay attention in Google ads for search campaigns, you can look at the user queries and get a handle on what they’re searching for. And if you see in there that your brand name, brand name, brand name keeps coming to the top, it is earning the greatest amount of conversions.  

You need to do an experiment and maybe do an AB test, where the B side is, you add your brand name as a negative to that particular campaign or ad group and see what you get. I guarantee your conversions are going to go down, your cost per click, your cost per conversion, all of these things are going to go up. But what you need to be testing for is the ultimate outcome. Are you are you able to take that inside, non branded and have serious conversations that become students or. It is it really just your brand name is doing the job, in which case this gives you a little more ammunition for a branding campaign, for for something else that gets you out there, beyond your comfort zone, beyond your known zone, if you will. 

So that that’s one thing you should probably be paying attention to, that’s deep, my dude, okay, it’s deep. It Well, it’s also expensive. Well, if it was, if it was in the budget, I’d be like, pissed, yeah. But, you know, you know, yeah, Chris rambling at this point, it will, but it’s, 

I’ve had at least three or four conversations in the last six to seven weeks with people we work with, but we don’t do advertising for them. We’re seeing what’s going on, and I’m telling them that the 70% 80, 90% of the conversions are getting are coming from their own brand name, and they didn’t know it. But it sure looks good on paper. It looks good on paper. This also tends to be an activity where it looks really good, particularly if you have a low budget. That actually brings us to the next thing. Hey, that was a segue that was unintended. 

All right, my mom, she’ll be proud to the budget is something we need to pay attention to. First off, if you’ve got a low budget very often, branding is what gets you your activity. But here’s the other side of budget. If you set up your campaigns and you’re using automated bidding, a best practice, a suggestion, a well, no, it’s a strong recommendation, not just a suggestion, make sure your budget can afford you to get one conversion per day. So if that means that your cost per conversion is $25 you’ve got to have a $25 a day budget times 30.4 for your monthly budget. Minimum. Automation and bidding requires data, and what it’s trying to do is earn you conversions, and it needs a steady and consistent flow, not constant. All your conversions may come on Thursday, but if it’s consistently Thursdays, it’ll figure it out. It’s not bad, but it needs a flow of conversions coming in to do its job, and if it’s starved for that information, the automation is just going to keep plugging away, testing things. It’s not going to know what to do, eventually you will probably earn enough conversions that it can start working for you. 

But here’s the deal, make sure that your budget is sufficient to earn a conversion a day, feed the feast, feed the beast. But it’s not just that. It’s effectiveness. If you can’t afford one conversion a day, maybe you need to find a different tactic to use, maybe you need to be building a little more awareness. Maybe your your tactic isn’t a search campaign, but a display campaign paired with search, a performance Max campaign paired with search, something to get involved a little further, little further back from the decision point, so that people are primed for that moment of decision to choose you, to increase your conversions, you can’t really sell a product if people don’t know you Right, right? You know, how often have you gone on to something like Amazon or Etsy or something else and looked at something and said, I gotta have that. It’s probably happened, but it’s rare for most people. Yeah, you’re going to spend time looking at the different brands, the different prices like this might be coming from some tiny village that I’ve never heard of. It could be awesome. It could be a piece of crap. Yeah, yeah. There was a, there was an online offer, a really, really cool backyard ornament that was a wind ornament, and it was, was a hoop, and the outside part seemed to turn inside itself. People ordered it, and then they realized when they got it, it was only about 11 inches tall. Okay, impulse buys 11 inches tall. You spent maybe 20 bucks on it.  

Darn, let’s talk about a hernia operation. Let’s talk about knee replacement. Let’s talk about a three year commitment, a four year commitment to a school for an education. Let’s talk about flushing five grand down the drain every month for an entire semester and getting yelled at by your boss. There’s that, yeah, but we’re going to cut out all that great thing. No. Back to the talking about the the lawn ornament, but the point being here too little budget for your bidding strategy. You need to be realistic. And if you don’t have the conversions, and you don’t have the bat budget, go back to a more manual approach, this can require more hands on, more time you’d still want to avoid, perhaps those branded keywords like a plague, but you don’t want to be using automation to just flail around and spend money trying to be successful if it can’t be.  

The things you have control over are your budget, your geography and your target. It’s if your budget is fixed and your target is specific, then really, you know you’ve only got one thing left there that you can, that you can, that you can work with. 

Be specific. Be more specific. Home in on the exact thing you want do something to narrow your targeting down to get the conversions you need get at least a conversion a day, 30 conversions a month. Whatever it is that cost per conversion times 30.4 becomes your monthly budget. Ask these questions up front, look for that up front, understand the first month. May not hit those targets, but it’s important cool little budget for your bidding strategy. Okay, that’s number two. 

Here’s the here’s number three, sending ads, sending clicks from very specific ads to very generic landing pages. This the worst one. Again, this is something we see very often coupled to campaigns that are very rich in branded search activity. If I’ve searched for that business class at your school brand name, and I click on your ad, and I was intending to come to your school in the first place, and I go to your branding page that says, Hey, glad to meet you. Click here. Learn more. Okay, that’s not very tough. I’m probably going to do that. 

But if the the objective is to get plus growth, if you’re if you’re looking to get that incremental lift that’s beyond the students you would normally get anyway, if you have an ad out there for that business degree, it needs to land on a page about business degrees. Let’s get a little more specific. If it is a business degree, slash accounting, then the page better start have a good chunk of content about accounting, because remember from a previous podcast, you got less than 10 seconds to hold my attention. Yep, gotta see those words that matter to you, right? So this is really a big deal, sending clicks from specific program or service searches generic pages. And we have, and I’ll use another school example, we have schools that might have a low tuition initiative, and it’s low tuition initiative, you know, for the next three months, or for those school year, whatever it is, this is it. And they build a landing page talking about that initiative, and it’ll have bullet lists of the of the programs that that cover it. That landing page is perfect for ads that say, we have a low tuition initiative. That landing page is not very good for somebody who says, hey, I want a business degree. I wouldn’t mind if the tuition were low.  

Little bit of difference in intent, a little bit of difference in importance between the two. Yes, if I’ve searched for a business degree, low tuition, that content page answers only half of that question. You have business degrees. Here’s all this content about low tuition, but what’s the quality of that degree? What degree is it? How long does it take? What is the coursework look like, you know, on and on and on. Is it a two year, four year certificate? What? None of that is contained. You will get those searches who are already familiar with you. I live five miles away from your college. I know who you are. It’s probably where I’m going to go. I search for business degree. I was probably going to click on your link anyway. But here’s an ad saying, hey, click here. Brand name as business degree. We go to that. Okay, I got to fill out the application form. Here’s the button that is not a plus student, that’s not growth baseline, yeah. It may be a temporary fix for a bad conversion experience on the website. It may be necessary as content is updated in the we’ll call it organic part of the website that get that same task accomplished, but you’re spending money to do something you should be getting for free. And let’s understand, I keep using the word free because the click may be free.  

The effort that go that went into earning that click with good, organic content has cost. The effort that goes into maintaining that content has cost. It’s just, it’s not equated to one click coming in cost me five bucks or three bucks. So the other part about it is, as you improve that organic content better serve the people who want to come to your website for these services, that content will become better at serving people who you pay to come to the website for those services. We’re going to get into this in another podcast about should you. Send paid clicks to an isolated, unique marketing landing page, or should you send it to your organic content of the same content type? We have two different opinions here in our organization, and we have had for 10 years, and it’s a fun, fun debate, because there’s not a right answer to that. Yeah, there can be the right answer is, send it towards can be most effective. Yeah, right. And if your website is not capable of conversion, your website is not capable of saying you asked for a business degree and with an emphasis on accounting, here’s that content, here’s the next step, take it and go on.  

If your website can’t act at the same level of of engagement as a marketing landing page. Can use a marketing landing page? Yeah, I want to add one thing to this, yes, make sure on that landing page that you have an action step. This is something that we see more than you would believe, like you got them to this page. It’s the right information, and then it’s a dead end. Like, well, thanks for coming. We’ll contact you, and that’s, like, not helpful, no, what you’ve just experienced as a vanity exercise. Yeah, we brought you here so we could brag at you about how much stuff we got. Yeah, put your name in here and we’ll call you, and we’re not going to give you anything, and you’re at the mercy of our timeline. Nobody likes that, especially millennials and Gen Z. We can we are not a fan of that approach. It’s as though, come here, learn about all this and either find it yourself or leave Yeah, go away, yeah. So yeah. We’ve talked about landing pages. We’ll do that more coming up. But really, this particular one is if you’re going to put an ad campaign in Mark in market, make sure that the click that you’re paying for is going to content that is that is tightly correlated to what you’re advertising. You can have a business landing page that has a section on accounting, that has a section on leadership that has a section on MBA. And if you link those things, we have these things, link, link, link to lower on the page. That would work. But going to that page about how we have a low cost tuition program, and here’s the bullet list of programs that that are supported. In that case, I would probably say you’re better off not advertising specific, pointed items unless you really want to flesh them out on the page with more descriptive content. Yeah, focus on the question that’s being asked, give that answer, and then Intuit what the other questions might be and answer those in understanding that what your landing page is talking about is the offer and not the program or service, and keep your advertising there. So that’s our that was our three things about how you’re probably doing digital advertising wrong.  

Mariah Tang: We’ve been schooled by Stu. 

Stu Eddins: Well, no, the stuff I’ve just talked about here is available almost anywhere if you start searching for content about it, this isn’t buried information, but it does seem to be something that that is well, if you’re buying these services from a vendor, you’re assuming the vendor has gone through this is paying attention, and You don’t know what that vendor’s motivation may be, or their setup perfectly valid thing. You may have a ton of branded clicks coming in on your campaign from that first point, and the vendor is saying, this is just how it works with us. And if this is what they do, that’s fine, but understand that, understand what you’re getting, and if it doesn’t align with what you want, remember, just like you’re advertising to achieve new students, customers or whatever, you’re the person on the inside of the equation for that vendor. And you are quite capable of saying, you know, I wish you wouldn’t do that. Don’t target these brand names so intensely. In fact, let’s find out how to avoid most of them. You know, I don’t feel that the search campaign with this type of bidding structure is going to be terribly effective. If I’m getting 15 conversions a month. Tell me, please, Mr. Mrs. Vendor, how is this campaign learning how to bid for me? How is it being efficient with my money. And then finally, you know, it’s great. We have this landing page you’ve built for us. It talks about this wonderful tuition reduction offer we have, but I I’m seeing that the search terms we’re matching to that are converting. Are people asking about low tuition, not about business class I need to fill, not about the health sciences classes I need to fill. The tuition is a feature of those classes, or that tuition assistance is the subject. 

Mariah Tang: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.