I recently participated in a round table discussion about Smart Bidding and the upcoming changes with FB and Apple’s iOS14 privacy policies. The podcast was hosted by Dean Hua of Sachi Studio. Other guests included Tom Beckerle of jWeb Media and Amy Hebdon of Paid Search Magic.

Below you’ll find Part I of the session where we discussed Google Ads Smart Bidding.

Here’s a direct link to watch Part II, on Apple’s upcoming privacy changes.

Full Transcript

Dean Hua:

Google Smart Bidding Strategies, max clicks, max conversions, target ROAS and target CPA, common myths and mistakes associated with them and what you should do. That’s coming up next.

Hey, welcome back, guys, if you’re new around here, my name is Dean Hua. I am a digital advertising strategist focused on paid media, and I work with a lot of local businesses to help improve their lead generation and attract new customers, and the content on this channel reflects that. So we have a really great episode today, in fact, is actually part one of two was so long that I actually break it up into two different parts, part two will drop in a couple of days. But part one is a roundtable discussion with three highly experienced media buyer friends of mine, focused on smart bidding strategies and everything you wanna know and what you should do and what you should avoid. All three of them have been in the Google advertising game for a while now, highly experienced, and what I’m going to do is actually moderate this roundtable discussion, and we’re going to talk about the myths, mistakes and opportunities associated with Google smart bidding strategies, max clicks, max conversions, target ROAS and target CPA. I believe that covers the main ones.

So I’ve been in Google advertising for the better part, six years now, for these last six years, whenever I take on an existing account that’s either been managed by another agency or maybe has been done by a DIY business owner who’s new to Google, I see a lot of mistakes being made with Google’s Smart Bidding Strategy platform. So I think that this is going to be a really good roundtable discussion where you guys can kinda learn from three other highly experienced media buyers, and really understand what it is and what it isn’t, what you should do and what you shouldn’t do. And then part two will be a roundtable discussion where we talk about predictions and trends for the pay per click marketing industry in 2021, not necessarily just Google ads, but we’ll talk a little bit about Facebook and LinkedIn ads as well, as well as how we are adjusting to the Facebook/iOS foreseen changes as well. So look for part two to drop in the next couple of days and I’ll link it in the description, and comment section.

And before we dive in, quick apologies for the audio on Zoom, my audio wasn’t the best setup at that time, I have since adjusted something, a lot better than what we had a month ago. So apologies for that. And also a quick question of the day for you guys, once you’ve watched this video, let me know in the comment section what you would like to see me cover regarding Google’s Smart Bidding Strategies moving forward. So let me know in the comment section what sort of questions you have or topics you’d like to see, and I will certainly consider that moving forward. So all that said let’s just dive right into this roundtable discussion. See you soon bye. Why don’t we start off with introductions, just real quickly, who you’re with and how long you’ve been in the industry, let’s go from left to right so Ed, Tom and then Amy. Ed.

Ed Goss:

Yeah, so my name is Ed Goss, I am the managing director and owner of Ten Thousand Foot View. And I started the agency in 2013 after having the aha moment about Google Ads and the opportunity that it presented for small business. I started as essentially a freelancer, as many of us did, and grew from there.

Tom Beckerle:

Yes. I’m Tom Beckerle, I am the Digital Marketing Manager at jWeb media. I started in the industry in ’08, but I really didn’t get into the management side of it until 2016, so yeah, that’s me.

Amy Hebdon:

I am Amy Hebdon, I have been doing Google Ad/AdWords since 2004, and in 2017, I launched Paid Search Magic along with my husband and business partner, so we’ve been managing, running our own agency since late 2017.

Dean Hua:

Awesome, so let’s just dive right in here. I’ve been in pay per click marketing for the last six or seven years, and like all of you who are veterans, we’ve seen a lot of stuff, come and go. I wanna dedicate a big portion of this show to smart and automated bidding strategies just because, I feel like there’s so much to discuss. My first question, and this is for Amy, but Ed and Tom feel free to just chime in here. What do you think is the biggest myth or misconception that people have about smart bidding strategies?

Amy Hebdon: Okay, that’s a good question, myth and misconception are different, right? I think that the biggest misconception is that if you have the right bidding strategy or if you can automate something, that means that you don’t have to do the work of building out your, strategy to decide on the strategy. You need to know what you’re trying to accomplish, and so many times people just say, “What bidding strategy should I use?” At an account level as if there’s one thing that’s gonna make your account work better if you just choose the right bidding strategy. But without a strategy, you’re trying to optimize this campaign for efficiency or volume, what are your objectives without knowing what you’re trying to accomplish, then just slapping a bidding strategy on it may not even matter, and it can make your account or a campaign perform worse where the same strategy could do better, just again, depending on how much data Google has and what your goals are, so it’s really about you leading what’s happening and then choosing the right strategy, the right bidding strategy to fit those objectives and not the other way around. I would say is the biggest misconception that you can just skip that step.

Dean Hua:

Okay.

Ed Goss:

Yeah, I would tend to agree with that, it’s definitely a big myth, one that I would kind of hone in on, which is make it a little more concise, which is just that a lot of people approach automated and smart bidding as set it and forget it, so they think, “Oh, well, if I turn on maximize conversions and just leave it alone, it’s gonna do its thing,” but they don’t take into account that they’ve got a budget that’s set way too high, and suddenly their cost per conversion just goes through the roof and they blow through all of their budget. So to me, that’s just something we see over and over getting into client accounts, that they’ve turned something on and then they’ve just left it and never really made adjustments or tweaked, or as you said, thought through the overall process of strategizing campaign goals.

Dean Hua:

Okay.

Amy Hebdon:

Can I say one thing that…

Dean Hua:

Yeah, go ahead.

Amy Hebdon:

I’ve seen come up quite a bit, and actually, just on the side, in my business, we’re going through audit month right now, so we have a lot of people who are kind of walking together, we just finished up account settings, and something reminded me that I didn’t realize how many people didn’t know, is that each time you change your bidding strategy or your attribution model, each time you change either one of those, Google essentially resets, and so all the learning that you have through the quarters and the years up until then, it kind of manages to forget, how to interpret a signal, how to interpret what’s gonna work for you, and that is the reason that if you have an account strategist, like a Google rep, every single quarter they give you different advice, “Well, you need to switch to this strategy, you need to switch to that,” because during that period that you’ve switched strategies, it resets to zero, and so things that would never work, never will work, all of a sudden they’re re-learning, and so they’re spending a crazy amount of money to be able to get to the point where they can optimize. And so during those first two or four weeks, it’s completely inefficient.

And so if you’re constantly changing strategies, that is gonna be a big problem. It doesn’t even matter which strategy it is, it’s just your changing is the problem. And so you do want to make sure that, again, not only are you strategic, I’m not saying you can’t ever change, but there has to be a reason. You can’t just change because your Google rep told you, because they’re incentivized and they get a bonus to tell you to change. And so just being consistent itself is a good strategy to have, whatever you set it up with. Being willing to commit to that is gonna be better for your account than if you’re constantly changing just for the sake of it.

Ed Goss:

Yeah, I agree with that, and I’d also say the same goes for budgets. Changing your budgets very frequently, or even changing if you’re doing tROAS bidding and changing that on a frequent basis, any of those types of changes are going to cause a disruption in performance and you’re gonna need to wait for two or three weeks for a kind of reset, particularly if you have an attribution model different than last click, then oftentimes you need to look back in time like three or four days before the current day in order to get accurate reporting. If you’re looking at current data, you’re not getting all those conversions that’ll be impactful, and that’s a big problem with a lot of clients ’cause they wanna change all the time. And so a lot of times our job is to kind of rein them in and say, “Look, we need stability in your account, that’s what’s going to cause us to improve your performance month over month. It may be incremental, it may not be huge, by dialling in what your business strategy is, aligning your goals and budget with that, that’s how you can get better performance, it’s not by constantly changing on a dime every day.”

Dean Hua:

Do you think that their desire to constantly change, which is a symptom of not wanting to commit, do you think a lot of it’s just them being uneducated? Or maybe it’s them being, what’s the word I’m looking for? I guess just really nervous, ’cause I had…

Ed Goss:

I think just fear, yeah, fear drives it, because if you make a change to an account, and two weeks go by and you’ve got a target ROAS of 400% and it’s coming in at 250%, the client’s gonna be very uneasy and like, “Hey, whatever change you made isn’t working.” So it is important to educate your clients, but even when you tell them that, you’re a small business owner, particularly in today’s environment, you can’t wait for two months for things to sort themselves out. So it’s a tricky situation in some cases, depending on the client.

Dean Hua:

Okay. Sort of a follow-up, and maybe you guys kinda touched on this, but in your experience, what’s the singular biggest mistake with smart bidding strategies?

Ed Goss:

Anybody? [chuckle]

Amy Hebdon:

Yeah, I think changing too frequently is a big mistake, but I would say just I guess the consequence of what I was saying before, just not knowing what you’re doing, not understanding how a bidding strategy works. I think so many times they’re like, “Oh, we’ll just let the data decide,” and I try to remind people data doesn’t make decisions, we make decisions based on how we understand the data to be working. And so if we’re just giving Google access to decide whatever it wants, we’re not setting ourselves up for success. And so it’s much less about choosing the right bidding strategy than it is having a strategy yourself, but the biggest mistake is that no one does that, they’re like, “Okay, cool, but what’s the right bidding strategy?” [chuckle] You know? Everyone just wants to blow past that and get the one true bidding strategy that’s gonna help them, and that’s just not how it works.

Ed Goss:

Yeah, I agree with that. I would say along those lines is just choosing the wrong strategy. So a client that definitely wants to have a consistent target CPA choosing max conversions ’cause it sounds good, it’s like, “Oh, well, if I choose max conversions, that’s gonna get me tons of conversions really inexpensively.” Well, no, it’s gonna be dependent on where your budget’s set, so a higher budget means you’re gonna be paying more per conversion. But again, a lot of clients or DIYs, don’t educate themselves. So first things first, what’s your business goal, what’s your budget, and then work back, and if the client says, “Hey, we don’t have a fixed budget as long as we get a certain cost per conversion, we’re happy,” then you do tCPA. But that for me, just choosing the wrong bidding strategy or constantly switching, as we talked about already, is a big problem.

Dean Hua:

Yeah, I had a… Actually just went through an audit, a small e-commerce shop, and I was looking through his change history. He was using target ROAS, and he was changing his bid strategy, I’m sorry, not the bid strategy, but he was changing his bid or his ROAS once every three days, and I was like, “No, no, no, that’s not how you do it. You gotta give it a couple of weeks to… Or even longer than that to see any sort of stuff can change.

Ed Goss:

Well, also fundamentally, target ROAS should be arrived at by understanding what margin you need to make on your products and then deciding, okay, well, what’s my past ROAS situation? What’s gonna be my average client lifetime value? Then balancing those things to arrive at a tROAS that drives business and drives volume, but at the same time, you don’t have cash because you’re financing these initial orders. So we have that conversation a lot with our shopping clients, and you’d be surprised how many people just don’t get that. And it takes a lot of discussion to drag the right data out of them.

Dean Hua:

Okay.

Tom Beckerle:

You can also use that. And again, not to slap Google for everything they recommend to you, but we found success as using their recommendation as a starting point and kind of going from there, right, and seeing good results from, I mean, great point. Especially, some of the people we see, 300% is not gonna cut it, especially with figure cost per acquisition and everything that’s involved, what the margins are. But like I said, based on account of data, we’ve seen some good come out of the recommendations.

Dean Hua:

Okay. Let’s get a bit more granular here. Let’s talk about local lead gen, for example. Tom, is there a particular bid strategy that you’d like to work with when you first start out?

Tom Beckerle:

I will build conversions first, right? You gotta have everything in place to be able to measure that. And I’m surprised, I guess, by how many accounts you get into, and you don’t have a dynamic number insert, you’re not tracking form submissions. Once I get that data, then we can get into CPA bidding, which is where we kind of find our most success with. But again, like I said, not being able to measure conversions I think is the biggest problem that I ran into, but target CPA’s what we see the most success with for local lead gen anyway.

Dean:

Ed or Amy?

Amy Hebdon:

I don’t do a lot of local lead gen, but I think Tom’s point is true no matter what the industry is, that if you don’t have the conversion data, you’re not gonna get good success with just telling Google to then either you pick to target CPA or you picked… They don’t know what drives conversions yet for you, or what drives viable conversions for you, so you can’t really expect them to use their secret signals if they don’t have any actual data. Getting that first before you then say to optimize based on this is usually the precursor to then putting that strategy into place.

Ed Goss:

Yeah. Further to that, I’ll just say, we start with a net new campaign, with a brand new account, obviously, you have your conversion goals set up, whether you’re using analytics or however you’re gonna do that. But we’ll usually start out with manual bidding or ECPC while we don’t have any data, and we’ll run that for… I mean, it kind of depends on what the ad spend is and what the volume of conversions are. We’ll run that for, let’s say, at least a couple of weeks, and maybe even could be a couple of months until we establish a good baseline of conversion volume. And in that time, we then take the opportunity to dial in your creative and your keyword strategy, and then you’re preparing yourself to then switch over to typically tCPA with lead gen ’cause usually there’s sensitivity around the cost per lead more so than the volume of leads, like get as many as possible for this budget. We are in the same boat that TCPA’s where we’re gonna end up, but we may not start there.

Dean Hua:

Okay. I think Google suggests 30 to 50 conversions within a 30-day rolling period, have you found that to be more or less the benchmark before you start to switch over?

Ed Goss:

We used to target 100 a couple of years ago. And as Google’s AI has improved, we’ve slowly rationed it down. We work with 25 now. It’s our magic number, it may be different again six months from now. And that’s not to say that 25 is always going to work ’cause there’s a lot of variables, but it’s a point where it’s likely to work and it’s worth testing at that point.

Dean Hua:

Okay. Has anyone had success with max conversions? I’ve tried a couple of times, I’ve never been able to get it to work. I’m wondering if you had success under what conditions.

Ed Goss:

Yeah, we run it when clients definitely… Like they say, “This is my budget. This is what I wanna spend. Do whatever you can within this $1000 a day” or whatever the amount is then running max conversion makes the most sense, ’cause you’re going to drive the maximum number of conversions. If you do tCPA, you may be hitting your budget for two weeks and all of a sudden it dries up. Now, okay, we’re spending half of what we’re supposed to be spending. It definitely makes sense when a client has a fixed budget. Is that going to always work better than doing ECPC bidding? Not necessarily. And that, again, goes back to what’s your volume. Definitely, if it’ll be hundreds of conversions a month, Max Conversions should almost always outstrip manual bidding.

Dean Hua:

Okay. What’s your…

Ed Goss:

By the way, that goes to maximize conversion value as well.

Dean Hua:

Going back to Target CPA, Amy, what’s your best advice or trick that you have with TCPA?

Amy Hebdon:

The best advice or trick for it, I guess my best advice is to make sure you know your numbers and then make sure you know what the next step is if you’re not able to hit it, because volume and efficiency are always at odds. You have to be able to have that conversation with your client or know what they wanna do. If we’re not getting enough volume, should we raise the target CPA? If this thing is happening, how should we handle this thing? To the point that it’s not set it and forget it, what does that mean? It means you have to re-examine how it’s working and make decisions based on that. And when we’re seeing that it’s not working, that there are signs of trouble, usually, we have to make decisions about, are we going to go ahead and raise the target CPA, or is that actually the maximum, we have to do something else and re-approach something else? It’s just understanding what your goals are, and then what you’re gonna do when those goals aren’t hit to be able to make a solid plan for how you deal with that.

Dean Hua:

Okay. Ed and Tom, do you have your best advice or trick for Target CPA?

Tom Beckerle:

Well, in higher competition, getting creative, and again, this kind of goes without saying obviously with everybody here, but getting creative with longer tail keyword searches that can get some wins for you, right. ’cause again, we’ve got industries where the cost can get away from us where we’re in 100-150 per ad, which is still profitable for the client, ’cause they’re in insurance restoration or what have you, but being creative with those types of risks for searches, stepping outside of the box and getting creative with searches and different ads is something we didn’t try to bring on in. And what I see a lot of is just service near me, everybody gets lazy and service near me and that’s your go-to. And you’re not gonna win the competition game of Google with that, so that’s where we try to be creative.

Dean Hua:

Okay.

Ed Goss:

I do have a trick, which is… I don’t know if it’s a trick or not, but using portfolio bidding strategies, it’s a really under-used feature, so if you have 15 campaigns that are all just different geographies, or you might have a topical search versus branded verus display using a portfolio bidding strategy will hopefully, arrive at an average tCPA that you’ll target across all those campaigns, so any one campaign might have a much better or much worse tCPA or actual CPA than what your average target is, but overall in your account, you will come out on top, and so what that can do is it can give lagging campaigns an opportunity to actually spend and then that can mean in turn by driving some conversions can start to optimize, versus a dead fish campaign where it’s like, okay, we’re at three conversions a month, that’s never gonna do anything, the portfolio bidding strategy can kind of kickstart that and get it kind of rolling.

Amy Hebdon:

I think that’s a really good point, especially when you line item out how the campaigns are performing, you’re gonna have more efficient and less efficient campaigns, and if you have an aggregate overall, we need our target CPA to be this. I’ve seen sometimes marketers are afraid of letting any particular campaign have a higher CPA than that, and so if you can just kinda get in the mindset of aggregate in total, this is what we’re going for, and it’s okay, this is a little bit above because this is way below and they’re gonna average out to be okay, ’cause otherwise it’s just too conservative, you’re not gonna hit your targets in terms of volume.

Dean Hua:

Okay.

Ed Goss:

It’s into like, having four different marketing channels that Amy was saying, well, this one, the cost per conversion’s too high, but if you cut off everything, then you just don’t have any volume anymore, so you gotta kind of compromise.

Dean Hua:

So back in November, two months ago, back in November 2020, Google started proactively promoting and encouraging advertisers to use broad match with smart bidding. I know it’s only been two months. Have any of you guys experimented with that at all? And if you haven’t, would you, I guess, trust Google enough to try experimenting with that? I know we all have our trust issues with Google Ads. Anyone?

Amy Hebdon:

I have not tried it, I have no interest in trying it, even with all the match types that we’re using that are not broad, we’re still seeing way too many variations and not enough search term data, and everything is just already not working, there’s no reason to make that… Shoot yourself in the foot and make it even harder by going broad. I just don’t see an advantage to doing that.

Tom Beckerle:

Yeah, getting searches for red roof and for roofing companies is not uncommon when testing broad match for… That’s ridiculous.

Ed Goss:

Yeah, my take is it may work, but the way it will work is by increasing ad spend. If you’re using target ROAS or something like that, and you add a bunch of keywords that are broad, you’re just gonna see Google flagging your campaign saying, “Oh, you’re spending 200 a day, you should be spending 1400 a day.” And you’re just like, okay, maybe you can still turn in a decent number, but the problem is, you’ve now kinda lost control of your keywords, you just kind of got four broad match keywords that are driving 95% of your clicks and conversions. And where do you go from there? So I think it’s a big problem. And it’s also a problem for us partner agencies that are trying to achieve that 70% Optiscore goal across our accounts, when as of just yesterday, seven of our accounts got flagged for this and our aggregate score dropped seven points overnight, so while Google’s trying to push us into doing this, and now at the same time, they’re just gonna start flagging our accounts with a whole bunch of issues all at once, and I was like, well, how do we keep the numbers up, we’re not just gonna like automatically be button pushers.

Tom Beckerle:

And it’s our job to be good stewards of our clients’ spend too, right, and to let that get away with that, just to keep, to maintain partner status and I hope something comes with it.

Dean Hua:

Yeah, I joked with a couple of friends that… It used to be years ago where if you had a partner status that was a badge of honor, but I feel like nowadays you shouldn’t even promote that on your website. Just don’t even bother mentioning it, not that most clients… At least for me, I’ve never really had clients care whether or not I have a partner badge status, but that’s my experience. Okay, so let’s switch over to target ROAS for a second. So target ROAS and shopping. How long do you guys wait before you make changes? People always say, “Well, let’s let the data lead us,” but what sort of, I guess, benchmarks or signals are you looking for before you start to make changes. Ed?

Ed Goss:

For me, it really depends on the number of SKUs and the conversion volume, so meaning if you are looking at your account and you’ve got 12 conversions in the course of a month, there’s not much to do, except worry that, okay, well it’s not driving anything. So for me, it’s always with any of these decisions, it’s really conversion volume, and then the right goal with shopping is just, okay, how many SKUs are we aggregating this volume over because it’s fine to say, hey, like 300 conversions a month is a ton, if you have 50,000 SKUs. And that’s spread out over a lot of those SKUs, Google doesn’t have enough kind of data per SKU to make good decisions, so that’s pretty much what we go by.

Dean Hua:

Okay, Amy.

Amy Hebdon:

I guess I have to say that we’re really fortunate with the shopping campaigns that we have in the accounts because we don’t tend to run into conversion volume problems, and we have, for the most part, been… Seen really good success with smart shopping and so in conversations with our clients, they’re usually willing to let go of… Let it be a little bit black box, that’s always the complaint is that you don’t have access to as much data, but given the returns that they’re getting it’s better than what we are able to get previously, and it’s really, really good returns, and they’ll take that return and sacrifice the transparency that maybe they would have preferred in order to get the performance, and so when you’re using smart shopping, you don’t have many options in terms of making changes, but it’s that trade-off that if you’re getting the performance results then you let it continue to run, and so that’s kind of where we are at with most of our clients.

Dean:

Okay.

Tom Beckerle:

Yeah, I have one I have experienced, but I’ve got a handful of clients on it, a handful of clients in shopping, and Dave we have extreme success with Target ROAS, and Amy, you mentioned to having some success with Smart Campaigns, I’d probably like to test that being that you speak so highly of it, so I’ll definitely take a look at it.

Ed Goss:

Yeah, one tip I would suggest for shopping if you run a standard shopping for a couple of months and then flip over to smart shopping, and actually, I’ll take that back, it’s a tip for agencies, you can actually take the negative keywords that you’ve built up from the standard shopping and get your rep to add those back in smart shopping, and a lot of people don’t realize that, so it is a way to kind of have a little bit more control when you want smart shopping, ’cause we do have a couple of clients where… Now we’ve flipped over to smart shopping, and even if the performance is good, they’ll be banging in search queries and they’ll be seeing stuff come out of it, it’s like, “Why is my ad showing for this, it shouldn’t be.” And so it’s a way to kind of allay customer frustration, so it’s a little trick, and I don’t know if it’s a little trick but we only found out about six months ago, it’s happenstance a rep mentioned it, it’s definitely not something that’s well published.

Dean Hua:

Yeah, I will use that sure. Last question about Smart bidding, then we will switch over to something else. Have any of you ever had this question from a client, “If everything is automated, why do I need to hire an agency?” How do you answer that? I know Amy kind of touched on it in the earlier part.

Tom Beckerle:

I would just piggy-back on exactly what she said, right? You need a strategy, this thing won’t lift itself, it won’t manage itself, you can let Google guide all of your decisions, but your spends going to get away from you and your conversions are gonna suffer as a result. And we’ve seen that over the course of the last year with just the recommendations made, again, we’re getting closer and closer, like I said, with the machine learning, but we’re years out before that’s a conversation.

Dean Hue:

Okay.

Amy Hebdon:

Well, and I think it’s important too that people understand that Google is… Alphabet is a corporation. Google ads is owned by Alphabet, it is obligated to its shareholders to increase revenue, that doesn’t… They’re not obligated to increase performance results, and so they’re going to be continuing to make optimizations, we’ve seen this for… Since it’s inception and it’s only getting stronger ’cause they continue to have to provide better returns quarter over quarter, year over year. That their goal is to drive spend, spend comes from increased costs for clicks, and it comes from more clicks, whether or not those clicks turn into sales for you, and whether or not those increased costs cut into your margins. That’s their goal. And so if they’re presenting you with, automation of opportunities to say, hey, you don’t have to touch it, I mean who benefits from that? Largely them, and so to the extent that you can say, “Okay, well, it’s easier now,” it may be easier, but did that make it better? Did that make it perform to your advantage, and how do you know?

You need to have someone who is at the wheel who can… Who’s not just an account manager, but an account leader who can help make informed decisions based on your objectives, based on your business goals, and not just based on data in the account and pushing, start and pause or whatever the case may be, having that skill set, has always been important. I’d say it’s getting more important as being in the weeds is becoming a little bit less necessary as there are all these other tools, but it’s how to use those tools effectively, that makes you good at what you do or not very good at what you do. I would say that if you don’t know how to do anything other than push buttons, then yeah, you are in competition with automation, but if you can think beyond that and be strategic and a leader, then not only do you have job security, but you become more and more valuable as the playing field kind of levels out and those tools are available to everyone.

Ed Goss:

Yeah, I agree 100% that it’s really understanding how to use the tools and where to apply the tools and which of the 14 different campaign types and settings that you need to use in any given situation because, yeah, there’s a ton of automation and things can be set up very quickly, like some of the new Smart Campaigns that Google offers, but that’s just not appropriate in every situation. And so the other part is, things change, and there’s like 30 changes every month from Google, and somebody needs to understand the implication of those different changes, how it impacts your account what to apply when. So as Tom said, we’re miles or years away from having fully automatic campaigns where you put in your domain name and you’re done. So I think we’ll stick around for a long time, but our role is shifting from a kind of being in the weeds and dealing with keyword bids, and that kind of a thing, migrating more towards overall strategic decisions. And that is a fundamental shift in kind of the way that we used to work to the way that we are working now, and we will work a year from now.

Dean:

Hey marketers, if you want to improve your Google or YouTube ad performance, I have good news for you. We actually do provide audits for both platforms, if you feel your paid ads are performing poorly click on the first link in the description below to learn how we can boost your performance and lead generation, and as always, stay curious.

[end video]

If you’re interested in learning more about Google Ads bidding strategies check out “The Right Google Bidding Strategy for You” article here.