PPC Essentials Part 2: Where Investors Go Wrong With Ad Copy

[Music] [Music] Welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast. This is your host, Brandon Baitman, and today I'll be joined by Sha Yun from my team. Sha Yun is an account strategist who works with over 50 real estate investors across the country. We're going to be talking all about Google Ads, specifically the ads themselves. This is part two of an eight-part series about all the things that matter to have a successful PPC campaign. We'll talk about where investors go wrong, where they potentially do better, and how you can do exceptionally well so your competition cannot catch up to you.

All right, how you doing today, Shayn?

I'm pretty good.

Awesome, happy to hear it! Another last-minute podcast for you?

Oh yeah, excited! My favorite kind. This is the second part of a probably eight-part—unless we change our minds—series that covers all the things you need to do to have an excellent performing PPC campaign. For each of those things, we're going to talk about what people do wrong, what they can do better, and how to do it absolutely best so that your competition can never catch you. We'll talk about all three of those things today. Last time, the topic was keywords; this time, the topic is ads. Those are the first two out of, like I said, eight things that have to do with Google search. If you don't care about the details of Google Ads, if you don't want to get into the weeds, this episode is not for you, and this whole series isn't for you. But if you have an interest in the specific weeds, you want to know why your campaign's not performing, you want to understand the specific aspects of the ads and how they work, then this is a great episode to dig into some of that stuff in more detail. And we will share all of our secrets so that you can hear them. Super excited to get into things, so let's start with what people are doing wrong. I'm thinking we could just do it one by one: what are they doing wrong, and what's the better version when it comes to ads? What would you say is the first thing that people are messing up with?

Yeah, honestly, one of the first things I want to talk about is people only using one ad in their ad groups—the one responsive ad. It's one of the easier pitfalls to fall into because it's easy: you only set up one ad. It makes some people think, "Hey, I'm going to test this and replace it with more content later on," and things like that. But when you have only one ad in your ad group, it limits what Google can do. Google has what, something like 75,000 touch points on everyone? We've shared different numbers of different points in this podcast, and all of them are different. I know they're probably all different, but we don't actually—I don't know that anybody knows—but it's a lot, a bigger number than anybody can imagine.

Yeah, it's massive. And so it's—I think in that context—giving Google more to play with allows it to do what it wants to do and do best. Let it test the different responsive ads; let it show people what it thinks is going to be best because you can set up your demographic of what you want and everything like that, but you don't really know Billy Bob Joe who's going to be searching for "We buy houses" later on today. You don't know what he's like, and Google does, though. And so by giving Google options within the ads to talk about, it can know, "Okay, this responsive ad is going to be better for Billy than this other one," and you're more likely to convert; you're more likely to have better lead quality and lead flow with more options for Google. And so having multiple responsive ads is something that I think is a huge problem because a lot of people don't do it. They'll just have one ad, one ad group, one campaign.

Yeah, gotta get more in there.

Yeah, I get what you're saying. I'll just add a couple of things. I think we probably want to clarify responsive ads in case someone's not familiar with that. Google, for the longest time, used primarily expanded text ads. And what that was is it's exactly what you expect to see from Google: there's like headline one, headline two, headline three—sometimes they added that kind of partway through and used it half the time—and that was that. That was kind of how Google functioned. Now they have these things called responsive ads, which means you just throw in—I think it's up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, or maybe more than four descriptions; I can't remember; there's some other options—but I think it's four.

Yeah.

So you put in a bunch of descriptions, a bunch of headlines, and then Google just mixes and matches that and turns it into whatever ad it wants. And a lot of people think, because they're doing that, they don't have to have multiple of those because there's like lots of assets there. So on one hand, you need to have a lot of things in the responsive search ad so Google has options, but the tough thing is you can't have things that don't make sense together in there. So that's where having multiple ads allows you to have multiple themes. Then you can be testing theme one versus theme two in addition to testing which headlines work for each theme best. Otherwise, you're just restricted to one ad, one theme, or you have multiple themes in there, and your ads don't actually make sense because Google throws all those headlines in whatever order they want to throw them in, and it just doesn't actually make sense.

Yeah, no. And I think on top of that, as well, making sure that you have them grouped by the right themes too—like not grouping them just randomly and things like that. You need to have them be along the same—I guess repeating what you said but a little bit deeper—is making sure that those themes actually go well together because when you have more than one ad, you do open yourself up to different messages being shown. And if you need to make sure that those messages are in line with what you're trying to get with that ad or with that campaign.

Absolutely. One kind of like sub-subtopic of this—not something we planned on talking about—is pinned headlines. You have any thoughts on pinned headlines?

I have mixed feelings about pinned headlines. They're beneficial if you know that a headline works well, but if you don't, don't pin—is kind of my opinion. I think you should give Google the opportunity to have a level playing field when you're first starting out a new campaign. I don't like to pin things when I'm just starting out—if it's like a fresh campaign that I have no data on. And given—like in our campaigns—we pin off the bat, but that's because we have aggregate data across all of our clients. We know what works and what doesn't. But if you're starting a brand new campaign, don't pin—is my opinion—don't pin anything in the beginning. Let Google play with everything, and then as you get some data in from performance, you'll start getting a picture of which headlines are working, which ones aren't. At that point, you can start pinning the ones that really work.

Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. And you're right that considering the data we have, we have more liberty to do more things earlier. You can kind of set up guardrails because we already know—where it's—oh, this is already learned in 20 other accounts that these are the headlines that work better here, or in this certain position, or whatever the case is—and just lower the number of things that Google's testing to just the ones that we think are most likely to work, and it gets you there faster because Google will get there, but it could take a really long time just doing things randomly. I would say there's one exception to what you talked about, and I see this problem with a few accounts that we audit where they have headlines that just don't make sense in certain orders. You have to make sure that they actually make sense because Google's machine learning doesn't really understand that; it just knows the performance of this headline is a certain thing. Like, for example, a call to action for the whole ad; you don't want that to be your headline number one. So you can pin, and there's ways to pin where you're just pinning to a position; you're not just making sure the headline shows up, but you're just saying, "If it does show up, make sure it shows up in spot number two or spot number three," or whatever the case is, because maybe it doesn't make sense if it shows up in spot number one. So it's hard to imagine because if you have 15 headlines, if you imagine every possible order that those could come in—if there's going to show three at a time—I know there's some mathematical way to figure that out, but the answer is it's a ton of stuff, but it has to actually make sense. And the machine learning will eventually find out what converts and what doesn't, but it needs to—sometimes it'll just take so long, and it has to gather so much data to get there that you can shortcut that process.

It's a good point. Any other notes on multiple ads? I think I've given my box, but summary there: just make sure you have multiple ads with similar themes; it helps a ton versus just having the one.

Yeah, absolutely. The next one that I want to touch on is what those headlines themselves say. I think there's a tendency for marketers overall to always be focused on what gets someone one step deeper down the funnel. So when we write an ad, we think, "How do we write an ad that someone wants to click?" But the other variable that we have to think about there is not just, "Are we getting someone down the funnel?" but "Who are we getting down the funnel?" And could it be that a certain headline attracts more people but less of the right people? And that's true really often. And then the other thing to think about with pay-per-click advertising is exactly that: pay-per-click. It's not pay-per-view or impression. Now, on Facebook, that's a different story; right? On Google, though, it's pay-per-click. So assuming you're going to be paying for that click, you want to make sure that you're qualifying the person. So that's where the rule of thumb is: qualify and convert, don't just convert. Whereas most marketers just focus on the convert section, they look at what ads get the highest percentage of clicks—the highest click-through rate—but we want to qualify, too. And I think a specific example of where that goes wrong in this industry is messaging around pricing. If you look at all the options that a seller has—basically a wholesaler is usually the absolute worst at price, and they're the best at everything else—and then they could go like retail, for example, that's much less convenient and takes a lot longer, but the price is better. So you just have to think of your strengths as a company. Literally, the thing that you're worst at is price, and I cannot tell you how many ads I look at in this industry that say, "We'll pay top dollar for your house," "You'll be shocked by how high our offer…" you know, all this stuff where it just doesn't attract the right kind of person by any means, and you pay for those clicks. And then those same people, when I'm doing these audits, they're complaining to me that their leads are all too retail; they all want too much money for their house. And I look at their ads, and their ads say, "We'll pay you more than anybody else," and they're surprised that those people are the people that are being attracted by those ads. So I think that's something to keep in mind: it's not just about what gets the most clicks; you want to think, "Each of these clicks you're going to pay for, how do you make them count?" The opposite version of that is you could say, "I'll buy your house for 50% of market value" in the ad or something like—nobody wants to click it then, right? So there's a balance here, but I think focusing on the pain points that you want people to have is a really good way to make sure you're getting the right people, and you can let your competitors buy all the clicks from the people that are motivated by the wrong things. It's the most ideal scenario. You have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, mostly along the lines of what you're saying here. I think some marketers take advantage of the fact that high lead flow looks good when quality suffers because of it. And that's where—like a lot of like broad match keywords and phrase match, exact match keywords—get for where we take the stance that we want—we don't turn the dial as far towards quality as possible. And honestly, like nine times out of 10, I feel like the investors that I work with are like, "I'd rather have high quality, a little bit lower lead flow, than like massive lead flow, low quality." It's just better to be not filtering through all the garbage. And so that's what I typically recommend: really trying to decide what you want as quality and making sure that your message is absolutely in line with that because, like you said, if you just say, "We'll buy your house regardless, no terms attached," everyone will come to you, but you won't get any deals out of it because you can't do that, and you don't want that. So having that key messaging of making sure that you have a good balance of, "Hey, we want to convert this ad, but at the same time, we want to make sure it's the right person," is super crucial in making sure that it's a successful ad campaign. Here's another thing: I completely agree with what you said. I think another thing that makes us even more dangerous is the machine learning that we're dealing with in Google where you can give it 15 headlines, and it's going to start to learn. And if you look over time, it's probably going to end up serving a few of those headlines way, way more than the other ones because it finds that they work better. So if you have some things that attract the wrong people, but they get a lot of clicks, you risk—even though that's one headline in 15—you risk that headline is going to be shown 90% of the time because Google's AI is going to learn that's a good headline because, by every measure that they have, it's showing that it's a good headline. And that's—I think—probably the most dangerous thing about—we see this on Facebook, too—it's not just about having the thing there and attracting the wrong people; the problem is these ad platforms, they double down on mistakes, and you start spending all your money on a piece of junk over some time.

Yeah, it's like just imagine giving your acquisition manager a high five every time they get just a really bad deal, a bad contract. That's exactly what you're doing by trying to just push high lead flow with all these ridiculous statements in Google, so because Google thinks that you want it, and it'll give you more for a long time, too, because you have to retrain it if you try to change. So yeah, absolutely. What else? You have any other items?

Yeah, the other one that I wanted to talk about is making sure that your keywords are actually relevant in your headlines. One of the things that we've talked about numerous times is that you've got to be really careful with what you're using in the headlines because Google—it's AI—doesn't understand proper English and things like that, and you can get some really weird-looking headlines coming out of Google if you're not careful about what you're putting in there. Making sure that you have headlines that are going to sound attractive to people, but not just like keyword stuffing them. What I typically recommend in those situations is you want to have your keywords in your headlines and things like that and your description, but you can't just have just your keyword and just shove a bunch of keywords into it. This isn't the 90s anymore; we can't do that, right? It has to be relevant; it has to look good. People read things on Google, and you just think of the scammiest ads you've ever seen on Google, and they all look exactly like that. Think of—I think of—um, Alibaba, for example. Have you ever shopped on Alibaba? Their listing titles are just like keyword-stuffed to every keyword possible that could be related to that item, and it looks so bad, and you just look at it, you're like, "Yeah, I'm not buying that; that's weird." So you want to make sure in your headlines and titles on Google that it sounds good; it's something somebody's going to read and be like, "Oh, that sounds like a reputable company." And on top of that, also, it ties into making sure that you're qualifying and not just converting as well—making sure that you're not just putting the keyword in there. You can't just have a dynamic keyword line in your headline so it just shoves their keyword in there every time they search for it. You need to have good content that people can read and actually like, "Yeah, that solves my situation." If someone's searching "sell my house for cash," you can't just have an ad that says, "Sell my house for cash," and then it just looks weird. You have to be like, "We'll buy your house for cash," and here's our stipulations, those things to help try to qualify that as well. So that's my thoughts on keyword stuffing and having good quality headlines. You have anything to add to that?

I think what you just noted is the most common way that people screw this up. I think of it kind of like a continuum, though. You have that side that you just talked about, which is Alibaba—keyword-stuffed everything—do it for the algorithm, not for the person. And then you have, on the far other side—this is much less common in this industry—but then we have brand marketers. Like, never have a brand marketer write your PPC headlines because it's going to be like something incredibly creative, and nobody's going to get it. They always think too creatively, too high of cognitive resources that are necessary to understand it, and it's always like the next step instead of clarifying that this is relevant to what you just searched. So it's one of those things that—which sounds amazing—but for people that are like the average cognitive resources that people have available as they're doing searches on Google is not enough to comprehend those headlines. So that's one side, and then yours—the other side—is kind of in between because if you don't put enough keywords in your headlines and that kind of thing, then Google doesn't like you because part of your quality score is going to be your ad relevance; you'll actually be charged a higher cost per click if you don't have your ads hyper-relevant to your keywords. And including the keywords in the ads is a great way to do that, or like slight variations. But yeah, you can go too far. So I think it's about finding the balance for sure. One thing on that topic is—mentioned this briefly—it's dynamic keyword insertion. Yeah, this has been a common practice in Google Ads for a long time. Google has these dynamic possibilities where you can basically put your keyword into your ad dynamically as a headline. So someone searches something that matches to your "We buy houses" keyword, and then your ad will say "We buy houses," inserting that keyword in. And this is something that I've seen pretty problematic in a lot of accounts because what you can end up doing is you don't write your keywords with the intention of them being in an ad, but then you write an ad that inserts them. So your keyword might be "companies that buy houses," and then your ad might have dynamic keyword insertion, and then you insert "companies that buy houses" into your ad. And then just think of that: someone searches for "companies that buy houses," and then they read your ad, and it says "companies that buy houses"—that doesn't make sense. You're a company that buys houses, so you might say something being like, "We buy houses," right? And then it's like really clear. But if you just insert "companies that buy houses," that doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, and that can definitely bite you. It doesn't always make sense. I think one of the reasons that people do this is so they can have a single ad group. For anybody that's unfamiliar, an ad group is like a container that holds keywords and ads, and the idea is you want everything in it to be somewhat relevant to the other things. But if people put like all their keywords into a single ad group, then you have to have this in order for it to be relevant to all those different things. But if you have your ad group structure set up right, to where all the keywords in it are relatively the same, you don't have to dynamically put them into an ad to make it relevant. The other place where I've seen this bite people is in with trademarks. It's easy to have competitor keywords—which are just a pretty standard practice—that you have a competitor; the most common one's probably "We Buy Ugly Houses," right? But "We Buy Ugly Houses" as a keyword, it's a great keyword—so common almost that I think a lot of people don't even think about it as a competitor keyword, but it is technically. But then if you have dynamic keyword insertion, you'll take "We Buy Ugly Houses," and you'll put that in your headline, and then you're doing trademark infringement, and Google potentially won't even let it run, or if they do, you might get sued. And that particular company tends to be very litigious. Your other companies might—you can definitely use competitor keywords; generally, attorneys will agree that that's not illegal and that's not trademark infringement—but putting those in your ads so it looks like you are that company is very much trademark infringement because it causes confusion for the consumer. So that's another place to keep yourself out of legal trouble. You don't even have to write a trademarked ad to do trademark infringement in Google Ads; all you need is just the wrong setting turned on in your ad and a keyword that makes it trademark infringement, and you'll have no idea it's happening because you won't be seeing those ads very often.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely, because you never—you never realize that those things come together. So I generally—I don't know what you would say—I'd say just don't use dynamic keyword insertion; make a structure where that's not necessary. But if you do, definitely review all of your ads with that dynamic keyword insertion and make sure that you don't have trademark issues; make sure they actually make sense. Because anytime you do something dynamic like that, you just have to be careful about what could possibly pop up because there's tons of variations.

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm on the same page. I think using dynamic keywords is something that's much more tactical, and I wouldn't recommend using it as someone who doesn't work with ads daily. So that's my opinion on it. And you mentioned, too, earlier where you mention the ad score, and that's one thing, too. Uh, anytime you build an ad in Google, Google will give you an ad score, and it will dynamically update to be better or worse as you're building out the ads. It drives me nuts. If there's one piece of advice I could give on that, just don't pay attention to the ad score; it's not worth it. Google doesn't have your best interest in mind because that ad score is based on a very narrow set of rules that are meant to be widely purposed for every type of ad. And the problem is I've listened to tons of podcasts, tons of other agencies talking about their results of using—trying to—these ad scores, and it doesn't seem that it really has a meaningful impact on the ads in the way that people really think it does. I worked for an agency, and one of the top things on our list of things to do when we were building ads was make sure your ad scores were as close to 100% as possible, and it did nothing. And honestly, like the ads that agency did not do well with ads, in my opinion, and I think that's one of the reasons is they were so focused on what Google was telling them to do that they weren't focused on what was actually needed to happen. It's similar with the Google sales reps that call all of us every day; I get daily calls from them, and they don't know what you need to be doing; they know what Google wants you to be doing, and that's not going to benefit you. So as far as the ad scores go, when you're building out those ads, like you do want to have quality headlines and things like that, but Google will—if you're trying to hit that 100% score—Google, you will be stuffing keywords into your ads; you will be building ridiculous headlines that don't make sense just because you need another headline or something like that—kind of like you said, there's 15 headlines, four descriptions, and some other options as well. You don't have to have all 15 and all four if it doesn't work. Sometimes there's—there are situations where you don't need all that, but Google, in every situation, can say you need all 15, you need all four. So I just recommend don't pay attention to the ad score. With our ads, our ads do amazing, and our ad scores are not a reflection of that—Google standards. Yeah, we're just like average, and sometimes worse than that. I have one client that's doing just crazy right now; he's killing it, and I think he has an average of like 30% on his ad score, which is, in Google's eyes, horrendous. Don't worry about it; it's not really worth focusing on; it's at the bottom of the priority list.

Yeah, I'm going to join you on your soapbox for just a minute; this gets me fired up. Another one that I just hate: optimization score. This is so—the ad score is for an individual ad; the optimization score is what Google says for an entire account: how well is this optimized? And there's a lot of debate around this because this is why we're not a Premier Partner with Google because Google has this Premier Partner badge; you don't really get much from it—maybe slightly better rep. Most agencies just use it for their marketing to where they can say, "We're a Premier Partner with Google," and it's hard to achieve that because it is hard to achieve that. One—you have to have all these requirements with the number of accounts and how long you manage them and all this different stuff—but one that's just non-negotiable for me is you must have an optimization score across your clients of at least 70%. An optimization score is a completely arbitrary metric that Google assigns on an account level, saying it's not how well you optimize; it's how well are you following what Google wants you to do, and most of those recommendations are junk; they're not actually good things that actually—yeah—help our clients. So in order for us to be a partner with Google, we have to prove that we follow their rules, not what's best for our clients, and it—it drives me crazy. So that's why we're not—we're not a part of that program. But along those lines, we just—I just had an experience with a client over the weekend where I was just—I was looking in there; we were talking about something else, and I look in there, and I see in the change history—like your nightmare—where you see "applied recommendation." Which recommendations are kind of part of their optimization score; they say you should do these things. I'm like, "Why would we have applied a recommendation?" Who is it? And I look, and it was the client that did it in their app—like it just popped up—and it said, "Please let us do this; this will improve your results by this much," and it was to include the Search Partners Network in their ads. And so I messaged him immediately, and I'm like, "Why are you doing this?" And he's, "Oh, is that going to be a problem?" It's like you and I both know that he would have had like completely horrendous results over the next few months—death by spam is exactly what that Search Partners is—yes—and we'll talk about that more; I think we have an upcoming podcast on like settings and stuff like that—but that's just one example where all you have to do is just like follow the information that Google says, it'll completely destroy your results, and it's not actually what's best for you. So anyways, I was joining you on that soapbox. We want to optimize for performance, and we can't think of the ad platform and the feedback that it gets us about how well we're following what they want us to do as being synonymous with performance. I think if we can do both of those—like I'd love to apply recommendations if it's not something that's actually bad—even if it's neutral, I'm like, "I guess we could do that; I don't think it would really make a difference." Sure, if it makes Google like us more, why not? But yeah, but especially there's so much stuff that's just not great. And then one last thing I wanted to dive into a little bit more. So this concludes our section, "What are people doing wrong?" After this, we'll talk about what are the things that you can do to go above and beyond, but in terms of just playing wrong and looking at if you did this by the book, what would you do? Another thing is ad group structure, and I talked about this a little bit—how you want your ad groups to be themed based on keywords—to be clear on how people are doing this wrong exactly: there's a lot of people who put, for example, all their top keywords into an ad group because they consider ad groups just like an organizational thing. But the problem is ad groups need to be organized around relevance because if you have different keywords that are about different things in the ad group, then you don't have a way to write ads that are hyper-relevant to all of those different things. And this is another one of those things that's on a continuum: you have on the far side you have SKAGs—which are a kind of dying trend in Google Ads—where people do—it's called SKAG for single keyword ad group—and you just put one keyword in there, and then technically everything's completely hyper-relevant, but you have a thousand ad groups, and that's not great for Google's algorithm. On the other side, you have these—these people that have one or two ad groups where they're just setting things up like on a really basic level, and then you can't really write ads that are really relevant to it. So part of writing good ads is having the right structure where things are topically relevant. Some feedback for anybody: I think it kind of depends on where your budget is. Usually, we average—I think it's 13 ad groups per campaign—is really normal for us; that gives you an idea of where I think that balance is. It's enough categories to where you can put "as is" in a different place than "fast" in a different place than "any condition," etc., but you don't have two ad groups for like "fast" versus "quickly" when they're the same thing. So that's my opinion on ad group structure, and I think—think it really helps your ad performance if you just put the ads into the right places. Any opinions on that?

Not too much else; I think you covered everything that I would have said. All right, so let's talk about the three things that you can do to step above just doing things by the book and doing it technically okay, and how do you make it so your competition will never catch you. So you want to talk about the first one?

Yeah, the first one I want to chat about is just copying your competition. And it's not great, but you do want to be looking at your competition to understand what they're doing. I feel like one of the—another one of the kind of pitfalls that marketers fall into is when—especially in generalist agencies—when you have a new client, a market you really haven't really dealt with before—like, "Okay, let me do some searches; see what other people are doing in these ads"—and then they'll take that, copy it, try to find what's getting the best rankings, copy that, get in their ads, and do it. It's not the way to do it, though, is because you'll just be white noise amongst the rest of your competitors if you're just doing the same thing as them. You need to be able to stand out. I feel like in—especially in this industry—there's a lot of keywords, but they're all along the same lines. It's easy to fall into just blending in with everybody else, and everybody's saying, "We'll buy your house" in their ad, and you need to find ways to differentiate yourself from that competition. So when you show up in the four ads that show up on Google, yours looks better than all the other three who may say the exact same thing. You want to be able to stand out and understand how you can—yeah—separate yourself from the rest of your competition in the ads. So I think that's one of the best things you can be doing, and a lot of that comes with research. I think, in fact, all of these best things are things that are going to require some effort and research on your end where you can't just do—take the easy route and do what's easiest and such. So that's what I would recommend: look at your competition, what they're doing; don't copy it; find a way to differentiate yourself; it will benefit you a lot more than just trying to figure out what was working with everybody else. And as for how to do that, there's a lot of tools. I think SpyFu and SEMrush both have options for that; those both cost money—or SpyFu has pretty cheap—and I love SpyFu; I think SpyFu is an amazing tool that you can look into; get a lot of insight into what your competition is doing. And honestly, like if—as if you're a—if you're trying to run your own ads, I think SpyFu is one of the best places to start with because that gives you a starting point when you don't know where to go.

Yeah, absolutely. It helps you know what your competition is doing, although I think they have some limits on their free options; it's pretty cheap to get stuff unlocked. Another thing: if you just want to do a little bit of research, there's a website called isearchfrom.com, and you go there, and you can search from any given location in the United States and just see what the ads are. So this is true especially if you're in virtual markets or something like it could be helpful to use a tool like SpyFu, but you can also just make a bunch of searches and look at what all the ads are. It gives you a decent idea of what's out there, too. So anyways, that's something that you can use on a national basis. And as part of our current ad writing process, we've done that everywhere.

Yep, and use that to compile what the ads are, so that's pretty helpful. The one I want to share here is an ad testing strategy. We all know that A/B testing matters, but nobody really likes it; nobody wants to do it; it's hard work; it's not fun work. And that's where I think it's underutilized. A lot of people just write ads, and then they run those ads forever. It really is—they're going to the optometrist: which one's better, one or two? Next, which one's better, one or two? Like, through that process, you slowly get to the one that's the best, and the same thing happens with ads where you run a few different things, you see which one's better, and then you take the best; you compare it to a next one.

Ads are working; which ones aren't? So, when you do an A/B test, just a quick note: make sure that you are honed in on those tests and not doing too many things, changing too many things, and having too many differences all at once. Yeah, it's—we preach this internally—every test needs a hypothesis and a learning that'll be gained if the hypothesis is either true or not true; otherwise, you're just doing things. I think there's a strong tendency to just do things. You can't just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. But the two things you throw at the wall should have one thing different between them, and you should be able to know that if that one sticks and the other one doesn't, then you've learned that this one thing is more sticky than that thing. That's a way to test.

Yep, yeah. Most people just throw random things at walls, and it doesn't help you; it doesn't help you learn a lot. What's the—you want to share the last thing? This one I honestly think is like a cheat because we talked about how the best things are hard to do. This one will make your life easier; this one's actually easy and it makes a big difference by our data. So this is the—this is the little hack of today's episode. Yeah. No, and the last thing is I want to touch on Dynamic locations. It makes your life easier because, in the past, before Dynamic locations were a thing, you had to set up multiple ads and campaigns for different locations. Very few investors are actually in like one city, and even if you're in one city, you still have all the other townships, villages, whatever you want to call them, around those cities that are still part of that city basically. And how much of the traffic really comes from the city proper versus all the cities that people would say, "I live in Salt Lake City," yeah, when they live in Lehigh, which is where we are now, it's because it's basically part of Salt Lake City, but it's not.

Yeah. No, and to that exact point, right, if like I—we're in the Salt Lake City metro, but I'm—we're a half hour away from Salt Lake City. If I have to do—tax season's coming up, right?—if I'm doing my taxes and I'm looking for a new tax guy, and I see an ad, "Salt Lake City tax advisors," and then I see an ad, "Salt Lake City or Utah Lehigh Utah tax advisors," I'm going to pick the Lehigh Utah one because I don't want to drive a half hour over. And in y'all's case, I would recommend using these Dynamic locations because you can use them to show the city that person is in. So if they're searching in Miami, but you're in Fort Lauderdale, right, the ad's going to show Miami, and it's going to be more relevant to them, and they're going to be more likely to convert, but you can cover all those areas, so it's fine. It doesn't impact on your end, especially with this industry; like very few people have offices that sellers actually go to, so it doesn't—they're not going to be upset if you're in a different city versus what they were searching. Right? It's just more relevant, more personal. People are almost always more likely to choose a business in their own city. It's like a personal bias, too; like you're just biased to places where you're at versus farther away. So yeah, absolutely use these Dynamic locations; they're very easy to do, and Google has instructions while you're building the ad on how you can do it, too. But utilize those Dynamic locations in your content on your ad to make your life easier and also make it more relevant to your sellers; they're much more likely to convert in those situations.

Yeah, absolutely. And in case nobody gathered it, I want to explain exactly what Dynamic locations are. And this is basically—in the headlines, in the descriptions, you can make it so that Google dynamically inserts the person's current present location into the ad. So you have one ad, but depending on where someone's searching from, they see that ad differently. And it's—I think another way to look at this—I agree with everything you said—another way to look at it is if—if I'm searching and I'm evaluating those headlines, what are people really looking for? They know these are different companies; they know that they're companies that could potentially help their problems, but they're thinking, "Where is the highest likelihood of my problem being solved?" So locations is just one more thing. Right? If someone says, "We buy in your state," then as a seller I look at that and I see, "Okay, I believe they could probably help me." If someone says the precise city that I'm in, maybe even a small city, and then I have a lot of belief, next to all the other ads, I don't say that it does stick out, and I think that makes quite a difference and how people go wrong with this. Everybody knows that this matters. I've seen people that make like a campaign for each area because they think that's how they have to do it, and they have to have like their—have it say in their A/B, and that's also really common for people who are across multiple metros, and they just put the metro in there. But you can actually have it so it all fits in one campaign and it has the individual city, just the metro in there. So how does someone find out how to do that if they want to do that?

Yeah, Google has help guides, and also when you're building the ads, they're—if you hover over down in—I believe it's—I'm trying to remember—I'm thinking that too—I know it's in there somewhere—ads editor. Yeah, ad editor is another—both uploads and the way that I would probably recommend doing it is if you're setting up a new Google ads, you'll probably be in the editor within Google ads.com. And if you hover over the content headlines, and there's a couple like little question mark things, if I remember correctly, there, then it'll tell you how to set those up; usually just uses brackets and things like that to tell Google that you want a dynamic headline, yeah, and location. Yeah, and if any—if any doubt, I think it's called Dynamic location insertion; just Google that and you'll find it. Yeah, so Dynamic location insertion for Google ads. So yeah, that's a great tip; we've seen it increases click-through rates without decreasing quality, and it helps your quality score, which helps your cost per click, which helps your return—return on investment, blah blah blah, right? All of these things that everybody cares about. So that's it for today's episode. I hope that you'll join us for the next part where we talk a little bit more about locations. I think that's what's next on our list. So thank you for joining us today, and we'll see you next [Music] [Music] time.