The POMCAST
A digital marketing podcast focused on local lead generation strategies and insights. Your search for in depth discussions, tips and tactics has led you to the right place.
The POMCAST
Eliminate Waste, Maximize ROI: Navigating Google Ads and Marketing Optimization
Discover how your digital marketing dollars might be slipping through the cracks as Mike Shaug, CEO of Premier Online Marketing gets into the details of hidden waste within Google Ads. We take a special look at the automotive industry, yet the insights discussed are universal, exposing how geo-targeting can be your best defense against irrelevant bot traffic. Mike also shares a staggering example of a misplaced $30,000 in Argentina, proving that even a single oversight can lead to a monumental blow to your marketing budget.
As we tackle the intricacies of Google Ads' Performance Max campaigns, the conversation turns to the peril of surrendering entirely to algorithmic automation. With Mike's expertise, we dissect the necessity for seasoned marketers to take the wheel, steering campaigns towards true business objectives and away from wasteful expenditures. The discussion spans across various industries, shining a spotlight on the subtleties of paid search, the significance of ad scheduling, and the specialized approach needed for B2B versus B2C marketing.
The episode concludes focusing on the art of advertising luxury goods, sharing strategies to pinpoint demographics that convert at higher rates. From utilizing CRM data for smart bid adjustments to leveraging YouTube's custom intent ads, we cover the gamut of high-end marketing tactics. And for those who are vigilant about their advertising health, we emphasize the transformative power of marketing audits, as illustrated by a client who discovered they were investing in irrelevant keywords. Join us for these revelations and more, ensuring your next click isn't just a cost, but a step towards a more prosperous return on investment.
Premier Online Marketing helps businesses grow through smart SEO, content, and search strategies. Learn more at www.premieronlinemarketing.com
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Podcast Directed and Produced by: www.hiredgunsagency.com
Welcome to the POMCAST, a digital marketing podcast focused on local lead generation insights and strategies. Your search for current digital marketing tips and I mean current digital marketing tips and tactics has led you to the right place. Thanks for tuning in. We're going to get right into it. Mike Schaug, founder CEO, most important person at Premier Online Marketing, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Speaker 2:Good to be here. Thank you for that intro. It's great. I think I'm going to make my wife say that every morning.
Speaker 1:It's really exciting for the audience listening and or watching. Mike and I have known each other for a long time. Mike is one of the foremost experts in digital marketing in multiple verticals. When you tune into this podcast, sometimes you'll hear us going deep in various verticals. Oftentimes you'll hear us talk about the automotive industry. You will also hear us talk from time to time about the multifamily industry, and it won't be limited to just that.
Speaker 1:Today, mike, most of the things that I want to ask you about are probably going to be mostly relative to car dealers, but maybe not, and today's episode is really kind of focused on. There's a lot of waste, and people have talked about this over the years of trying to understand how to not waste a lot of money when it comes to those investments within Google specifically, but it's not always limited there. But today, I know a lot of what we'll talk about will be relative to making sure that you're not wasting thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Google environment when you really need it to pay off for you. So, without further ado, the first place I want to start with you is some of the common pitfalls. There's a lot of inefficiencies within digital marketing spend and I know that you know some of the specifics. So if I were to just say, start with these common places where people unknowingly usually are wasting a lot of money within digital spend, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think the first thing that's really important to say at the front end is what Google says about their product as it being a very easy tool for Google AdWords or ad platforms being a very easy tool for customers to easily go get the right customer in a certain area very efficiently. That's not really true. It's actually way easier to waste money than it is to find customers. And the thing that's been very unusual, being in a performance marketing agency setting, is we always assume that Google is going to kind of make us irrelevant at some point as service. We always assume that Google is going to kind of make us irrelevant at some point as as service providers. Oh, they're going to make their platform so good, so dialed in, that it's going to be so easy for customers to acquire you know, car, car leads or whatever that they're not going to need us anymore. And the reality is all of these changes that Google has made recently have been kind of in opposite direction. So a few things that I look at when I'm evaluating ad spend through Google ads specifically is I look at where is your traffic coming from Just because I am in Austin, texas, and I have, say, a Toyota dealership or a Lexus dealership in this area and I'm bidding on each or whatever. That doesn't mean that all of my traffic is just going to come here from this area, something that I never see. So this would be. My first point would be location negatives.
Speaker 2:A funny situation that happened with us at Premier is recently. We have a ton of dealerships and real estate companies that we work with across the country and randomly, a lot of our customers on the West Coast started getting traffic from Papua New Guinea, which is near New Zealand, nowhere near anywhere. Our customers are, and what we learned was that the Google ad network became addressable in Papua New Guinea that month, and that's why we were seeing bot traffic. But we've also noticed that there's bot traffic that comes from Poland, from Lithuania, from Russia, from a ton of different countries. So the way you shouldn't have to think about bot traffic. It should be something that the platform just takes care of for you.
Speaker 2:If someone is trying to is in a bot farm in India, you shouldn't be serving your ad to that person, but unfortunately, that's not how it works. So something that we find as an absolute requirement is to target the area you want to target super specifically, and I'll get to that but also to exclude everyone else. You should be excluding every country that you can exclude in Africa, in Eastern Europe, in Southeast Asia and it seems really dumb that you have to do that, but you absolutely do or you will get some traffic from those areas and the degree to which location waste that will fluctuate greatly depending on the market of your client. So if you have a customer in New York, they are far more likely to get a ton of traffic from the rest of the world than someone in, say, dothan, alabama, you know. So you have to be more mindful of this in places like Houston, san Antonio, los Angeles, miami.
Speaker 2:And we've seen instances. I had an apartment customer in New York City that we acquired through an audit and they're one of the largest apartment developers actually in the country and they had spent $30,000 in Argentina randomly and it was interesting because we actually got to go pretty deep and look at were we converting anyone from Argentina? Was this useful traffic? Was this good spend? And the answer was no. It was not. Most of the leads and leases that this particular property had signed were within the New York, new jersey kind of tri-state area, so that made the waste in argentina or the waste in chile, just absolute money that they could have recovered, that they could have invested and so, just on a smaller scale, this is happening to car dealers, rv dealers, power sports dealers, all kinds of different businesses.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, that's uh, so you can tell audience. You just like subscribe and be like. Make sure that this is part of your regular listening, because, instead of just talking about all the anecdotal uh things that that a lot of people are good at discussing in digital marketing, mike literally starts off this episode by bringing their receipts, and I think that's what people really need to hear is you know, location negatives. For me and I haven't been in it in the thick of it like you have in several years just you know, looking at the top down, but just that alone representing tens of thousands of dollars of waste. If your providers don't talk to you about things like that and what they're doing for you around, location negatives seems like a a place that you might want to improve your own knowledge so that you know what you're really getting or not getting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ultimately it's yeah there's literally no downside to excluding every country that you don't do business in and there's very little downside in even excluding other states that you are not serving. Um, the other issue, outside of location negatives is going to be keyword negatives, obviously. You know if you PowerSports is a great example If you sell Can-Am Mavericks and you are just doing a lot of broad match bidding on keywords like Can-Am Maverick X3 or something like that, you are going to also pick up a ton of the parts and servicing and customization traffic. This varies by OEM. Oems that do more customization, like Jeep, fall prey to this much more than OEMs that don't do a lot of customization, like Fiat.
Speaker 2:So if you're bidding on Jeep Wrangler, you need to make sure that you're doing exclusions of things like risers, you know, lift kits, like all of these different, uh, popular customizations that people would do to jeeps. You want to make sure that you're excluding those because you will show up for them. Because if you're just typing in jeep gladiator 2024, google will match you to all the other permutations of that lease sale finance. Some of those are good but then it'll go brake pads, parts service center and a lot of those things are just not close to the sale and there's so much traffic that you can acquire that is right on the nose for what you want, exactly that.
Speaker 2:You just don't want to waste your money on all that other stuff. Sell that person the part after they become your customer and do an email marketing campaign to them. Don't want to waste your money on all that other stuff. Sell that person the part after they've become your customer and do an email marketing campaign to them. Don't allow your marketing through Google ads or Facebook ads to be inefficient and you get these kinds of incidental part sales. You hear that a lot Like people will say all of the calls I'm getting are from parts and service and the reason why a lot of the time is because they don't have the right keyword set up and structure to go after sales.
Speaker 1:That's another great tip, because the close association of somebody who's wanting to customize their Jeep and what they might search for, but they just don't think, well, you can't put it on the searcher to like, well, be more descriptive and say that you're looking for 2024 Jeep Gladiator lift kit. They are oftentimes not going to do that and so that's like a totally pro tip of how your campaigns are set up. And I'm going to just guess, even though it's a pretty educated guess, that most of the people in automotive they're setting up campaigns. One of the big reasons why everybody wants to pat themselves on the back for great service but would really not want to actually look under the hood is because I think there's probably a lot of lazy setup and they don't go into this detail around location negative, around keyword negative, and then you miss these things, which I get it. The association there is so close because it's relative, but to your point, that needs to come after the transaction of well, they actually have the primary product and then you can customize from there. That's pretty fascinating.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah, usually digital marketing teams kind of have to adapt to the product team and the product team can be a little further from the solution, and so much. There's so much change that the ad managers will be aware of because they see it happening month over month in their accounts and that really needs to translate into the product, because this product is evolving and it's always changing and what worked three years ago won't work as much today. So it's very rare In fact it's never happened where I've gone into a dealership marketing account and seen them make exclusions or do very specific targeting which we can talk about in a little bit, Definitely not a lot of negative keywords. So you just and I see a lot of broad match still, which is crazy.
Speaker 2:Back when we worked together we were talking about how broad match sucked and you would pull in a bunch of. If you want to sell, you know black coffee cups. You can't have the keyword coffee cup in there because you'll get red coffee cup, blue coffee cup, you know all these other ones. You have to be very specific about what you're selling and what's crazy is most of the marketing that is done at broad kind of scattershot sale is for very specific things. It's for you know that Can-Am Maverick X3. It's for you know something that costs tens of thousands of dollars, that the business sells, that tons of their customers are looking for, and good marketing management is just better aligning, uh, those two, those two needs it's the product that you have with the customer and trying to pare away everything that is similar but not I.
Speaker 1:I remember part of this topic coming up with you when we were working with both car dealers and motorcycle power sports and automotive. In the brands that sell both cars and motorcycles, like Honda, we were having issues come up with I think it was the Africa Twin and the Goldwing and then you'd find car dealers who are burning through budget with a terrible provide.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so bmw yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely honda, uh, or like yamaha dealers with all their musical equipment, like you have to understand the product menu and you've got to kind of proactively think ahead of the waste. It's like what else could Google waste my money on? So I guess I kind of closing out my opening statement is the factory installation with Google does not work for power sports, it does not work for car dealers and you will waste a tremendous amount of money.
Speaker 1:If you kind of follow the general practice of broad match, 20 mile radius P max and you know it's better for them to not have. Somebody that has 20 years of experience, maybe even from the beginning of Google AdWords to Google Ads in its current state, you have probably more educated insight than most around advising someone to take a standard onboarding or installation of hey, yeah, let's just try PMAX, because PMAX seems to be at least I could have this wrong, but I think it's. You know, upload all the assets, you know a video, some display ads, and we're going to use the smart copy for you know writing, you know you know, so the search ads, all this kind of stuff. And then it goes back to this. I, google, did a presentation years ago. I saw where it was let go and let google, where they're basically wanting, wanting the advertisers to just fully trust, like, hey, we know what's going on and we've got all this audience data and what kind of and ideally I understand that, as the, you know, as as Google, like I get it, like like that's what you'd want people to do. But would you agree? Cause it's my opinion that ultimately, though, if, if, what you really want is the very, very best results you can get and it's nuanced.
Speaker 1:Your industry is not just. You know, hey, we sell flowers or we sell jewelry or something. We sell something that's more expensive. There's complications that in those cases it's not advisable for and let's just use, let's just stay with car dealers. It's not advisable for a car dealer, in their paid search efforts with Google, to just trust that the provider is following exactly what Google says. And maybe it's not to the fault of Google, maybe it is, but that knowing their platform is actually much more smarter, making sure that your agency knows the platform much better, because when Google comes up with new things that might be beneficial to 60% of their audience, it's the 60% that you, as a Ford dealer, you're not part of that 60%, you're part of this 40% that needs to know we've got to be able to move this lever on some components within the display part or the search partners or whatever it is, so that you're always basically squeezing out the very best result for the client.
Speaker 1:Would you say that that's kind of like Google themselves as a business would want? Just let us kind of run all the stuff. But the reality is is that there are a lot of business types, especially like car dealers, but you can't. You can't do that. As much as that would be pie in the sky, wonderful, you really have to have people that have quite a lot meaning years of experience with the platform, knowing what it was capable of in the beginning and how much of that's still applicable to today, so that your campaigns are built with this type of care that you're talking about just literally within, just talking about negatives around location and keywords and targeting, I think is really to me that makes all the sense in the world that ideally, Google would want that, but that's probably a bad idea to just let them run with it let go in that google thing and that was like it was hilarious because it's such bullshit, but they really believed it.
Speaker 2:You know they they're like how could you not trust us? Yeah, you know, we know car buyers. There aren't car buyers. There are subaru buyers which are very specific and there are polaris buyers which are very specific. There are there are Harley Davidson buyers which are different than Suzuki buyers, but for them it's just like well, we have all this car buying intent and they buy data from Experian and all these other things.
Speaker 2:But part of their platform is optimizing through waste and like a huge value proposition that they have and like well, we are going to be more efficient with your money if you just kind of seed the control over to us, but we're not going to show you how we did it. So, kind of touching on, like P max, for instance, I it's, there are some great ways to leverage it, but I don't like it directionally for the platform because essentially, where Google is trying to direct all of the, the google search traffic, which is their best product, by far, substantially better than their display pad product, which we can talk about later it's terrible, um but uh, for their search product. They would make so much more money if agencies like me could not do location exclusions. Interestingly enough, location exclusions. You can only exclude 100 locations or something like that. They're capping it, which is ridiculous because there are 190 countries in the world or something. You should at least be able to exclude all that and a handful of states. But now you can't do that. Why are they doing that? That doesn't make sense. The platform does not optimize. It optimizes based on the data that you feed it. So if an ad platform has bad data let's say someone sets up a conversion incorrectly then you could have the platform optimizing to that input. That was not correct. Yeah, I definitely there are.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately now there are a number of different search and shopping targeting. That is only addressable through PMAX. So you are going to have to become a master of P. A good platform that is kind of set it and forget it. They're trying to force people to set it and forget it, but the problem is people are going to see it in their performance and agencies bear the brunt of this when the platform doesn't work out.
Speaker 2:We're the idiots, it's not Google. So Google can kind of maintain this air of neutrality and change their talking points whenever they want, but for us, as performance marketers within the automotive industry, we are trying to keep our customers, get you know, under a CPC of $3 and 50 cents, under a CPA of 40 bucks, it's very hard to do that when you take away all these levers of control. So definitely don't let go and let Google watch them. They are absolutely the fox that's guarding the hen house. It's a fantastic. I love Google search. It's such a great product, but it's definitely one that has to be managed because you can waste money for each year.
Speaker 1:That's just a great point. It is I've said this for years the most amazing advertising platform that's been created in our lifetime. It's incredible Not that Metas isn't also. I mean, they just amass such an audience like that through a search engine that everybody uses and, wow, we could come up with a pretty cool advertising platform with that, and they have.
Speaker 1:And I still tell businesses, both B2B and B2C, you probably should be doing some amount of paid search, but I always recommend to people find the smartest people that you can work with, though for it, because if you don't understand those changes and nuances you just mentioned it, it's really easy for Google to kind of stay in that position of neutrality and like we're just Google, we're just it's our ad platform and you got to make the best of it or whatever.
Speaker 1:But they are, as seemingly every year goes by, they are definitely more guiding people towards.
Speaker 1:We've built it in a way now that you can trust it to do a lot more for you and you don't have to worry about the details and I have found that not to really be 100% accurate, that the details very much still do matter, and I can at least say that I've known this on the B2C side for a long time, where dealers are getting hosed because their providers are terrible. It's not always like a Google fault. Sometimes it's, in fact I would say that it's a very large percentage of the time that the provider of Google services is just terrible at what they do. They're just not good, they take the easy way out and they're lazy. But it happens in B2B all the time too, because that's the world I live in mostly now, and the amount of waste that happens with B2B companies that go load up tens of thousands of dollars in search campaigns and display campaigns and then sit there and say there's no way for us to know whether we got a single deal from it. That is like an everyday, twice on Sunday thing going on.
Speaker 2:B2B is so hard and you need to have so many inputs and so much data to get that right. B2c is, I guess, the place where factory installation might be a little bit better B2C or B2B. A great example we had a customer we were trying to work with that did fleet management. Now there's a lot of different fleet management companies. This one in particular really only wanted to work with people that had more than 500 trucks, which is a ton of trucks, Meaning that if I'm a baker in Dallas that has three trucks and you want the software, I do not want to talk to you. I'm going to lose money in that conversation.
Speaker 2:But unfortunately for them, they had been investing in the keyword fleet management software for a long time and the vast majority of their leads were terrible. But B2B is super hard because the CEO of Wendy's and the bakery owner are going to use the same keyword. So you have to look at everything else, Like how can I upload first party data, how can I add more exclusions, how can I add other audience signals, demographic data like income level, All these other things to basically tell Google. I'm trying to kind of go for the top end of the market here.
Speaker 1:I'm not going for the middle or bottom. Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, so I know there's still a lot to uncover around some of these ways that people are wasting money. I know you are the one that really I think uncovered and I learned a lot from you around ad schedules, and we used to talk about this all the way back into even the Reach Local days. I mean way way back mid, mid, late 2000s, where I think you kind of started to uncover the fact that if there's not a schedule set up, that it just literally is like the beginning of waste. It's the beginning of also inaccurate data accumulation. That could be more helpful to you is that is our ad schedule still. Is that still an issue? Is that still an area where people can waste a lot of money?
Speaker 2:still a huge issue. I mean there are people searching 24 7. The bots work 24 7, which there is definitely issues with bot or spammy traffic on Google search, not just display. So what we find is your performance. It really depends on what your budget is, but you should maximize your budget around your conversion windows and if you work with an agency that doesn't talk to you about that at all or doesn't really explain to you when you get more phone calls, you probably shouldn't be working with them. But generally, like using car dealerships as an example, they tend to have better days than others and they have times of higher and lower call volume, but what they all have uniformly including dealerships in like Las Vegas is they don't, they're not open 24 hours a day. They're not. These dealerships work typically, from you know, 8am, 7am, sometimes in the morning, till about seven o'clock at night. That's you know. So that's, that's the hours of business. So you should hypothetically not be wasting too much money outside of that timeframe and you should be optimizing your budget for when you can get phone calls. So, typically people.
Speaker 2:Again, just general rule of thumb here, and the way that you're going to make this determination is going to come from your CRM, not my hunch or not from industry best practices. That won't be useful for your specific business. But you need to look and see when do I get the most phone calls, what are my hot days, what are my cold days, and then you need to increase and decrease your, your, your ad schedule, bid adjustments around those timeframes. If I were giving kind of a flat default schedule, I would say don't waste any money from 11 PM to 5 AM in the morning, 11 pm to 5 am in the morning, maybe start at 6 or 7. Keep your phone call. Like, don't run phone extensions during times that are not where people aren't answering the phone, because people will try to call you, you know.
Speaker 2:And try to create a ad schedule that is tiered in three-hour increments or one-hour increments, where, basically, when you create the ad schedule, you're not just saying, hey, I'm open from nine to five, it's, I want a schedule from nine to 11, from 11 to one, and then you're going to just watch and see where am I getting more phone calls? And then, after several months of this evaluation and a lot of consulting with your raw data that you have, then you can make the decision and say, hey, you know what Fridays, mondays, really kick ass for us. Sundays are kind of duds and that kind of tends to be the case in a lot of markets for us. So let's increase our bids on Monday. Let's increase them across the whole week, from the blocks from 11 to 3. And we're going to run into the evening. But maybe let's not put a bid adjustment that's positive on 9 to midnight. Maybe we do a negative bid adjustment because you want to be visible, because people will search for cars after hours. They're watching a TV show, they see an ad and maybe that'll spur some search, but they're less likely to convert at those times.
Speaker 2:So again, you have to be mindful of what your conversion windows are and optimize your budget around it. If you go into your ad account and you have zero ad schedule which is 80% of what my audits show you need to fire that agency because you are spending your money willy nilly throughout the night and like a really fun audit that I look at is how much money has been spent for the last five years between midnight and 5am and then how much, how many leads have I gotten? And that CPA is always super bad. And it's worse when you talk to the customer and say how many sales have been the result of a lead that came in at 4 am and the answer is usually zero. So you're looking at many tens of thousands of dollars and nothing to show for it. So, in terms of how you can run better digital marketing, advertising is control the time of day when your ads serve and control it around what is happening at your dealership, not just kind of a general best practice. Look at that a lot, because that does change sometimes and sometimes it's seasonal. Motorcycle dealerships are a very seasonal business, so this is something that you've got to be mindful of too. The other one and then, of course, we have the location exclusions.
Speaker 2:But shifting over to targeting, going back to the example of, say, a Honda dealership in Dallas, they may serve all of DFW, but 80% of their sales are going to come from five to 10 zip codes. But when you look at their targeting, they're just targeting the DMA of Dallas or 25 mile radius. It's usually based on someone's hunch of how far someone will drive and hopefully the person that had that hunch lives in the same city as you and they're not across the country and have no idea how long it takes to get from Irving to Fort Worth. You know, but like you know just all the time, I don't know why it's 25 miles, but that's what we see the vast majority of the time. You can no longer do zip code targets for auto anymore, but what you can do is micro radii.
Speaker 2:So what a well-optimized targeting area will look like will be a ton of little circles and what you're going to want to do is identify where are the zip codes that we're selling the most and maximize your bid adjustment to that area via micro radii or zip code if that's eligible for your industry. But essentially you want to say, hey, I know when my customers are coming in and I want to optimize for that time of day and I never want to show up during these times of day because I want to maximize my investment, for you know my hours of operation and also I don't want to show up in all these other places. I want to show up here in this area. Maybe it is a 25 mile service area, but I really want to spend 70% of my money in these seven zip codes because that is where 90% of my sales come from and if you just make those changes you will see a dramatic uptick in performance. We hear it all the time where people will show us, pump in, pump out reports and they'll say, hey, why is dealership XYZ selling more into my zip code than I am? And if they are a customer, then usually we are pretty well optimized to their areas of geography. But what that also means is that your competitor is getting dialed into where are your hot zones as well and you've got to spend more to defend those areas. And you should really be looking at those kinds of reports to see who is selling into your area, where are you selling into other competitive markets, because that'll give you a really strong indication of where are those prime targets.
Speaker 2:Because, again using Dallas as an example, you know if you're smack in the middle of Dallas, there are areas that you will never sell anything. A great example for Dallas would be Highland Park. Most of the Bentleys that are sold in Dallas are sold in Highland Park and in Plano and in Prosper. There's like a few different places, but they're not sold everywhere. There are no Bentleys in Oak Hill. There aren't very many Bentleys in Garland or Mesquite or Carrollton. So you have to be smart about how you invest your money and it becomes a lot more difficult with luxury products and more expensive products and power sports things that are kind of not primary. It's not the CRV that I'm buying for my work commute. It's my second Harley Davidson that customer is going to be in a specific area. They're not just kind of evenly dispersed.
Speaker 1:So much man. There was so much to unpack from that. This is just so helpful. I can only imagine for the audience A couple of things on that.
Speaker 1:So a question for you do you think that a lot of the other providers, like digital marketing providers that don't I'll go back first on scheduling that don't really do anything with setting up the ad schedules? They just kind of let it run? I usually hear people like that talk about how well your website's always open, like you're open 24-7 technically, because it's your virtual showroom and all these things we've been saying for you know decades. Do you think that most of them are and I'm not trying to get anybody off the hook but the reason why they don't do a lot of that is because they really believe that it's like, well, just leave it open all the time. Or is it possible that they realize that that's how you make more money too? It certainly makes Google's not going to shut it down because they're they're they're doing just fine off of it.
Speaker 1:But do you think the other agencies are just maybe not willfully ignorant, but they're ignorant. They don't know. They just don't know, which seems a little unbelievable. Or they realize, no, it will keep the budget. You know check coming in.
Speaker 2:Honestly, from our experience working in this space so much, I think everyone would like to have a program that is significantly better than another agency's paid media program. Like I don't think people are like you know what, we're going to hose our clients and be kind of you know assholes. There is definitely an aspect where it's like what is the least amount of work we can get away with and we see that on the SEO side all the time as well, where you know someone will be doing SEO with dealercom or something like that and we will have massive improvements within the first four months and we'll and they'll be like we didn't think SEO actually worked because we've been doing it for seven years. And the reality is they were paying for SEO for seven years but they weren't really getting good SEO.
Speaker 2:I think a big part of it on the paid media side is a lack of knowledge. There's so much turnover within agencies, the automotive industry in particular. You've got to have kind of a certain type of spine to work in the industry. A lot of type A's, a lot of pressure and a lot of digital marketers just don't want to do that. You know they want to go work in-house at a cool shoe company or something like that.
Speaker 2:They don't want to keep working with you know, they don't want to continue being a service provider for the automotive industry and the problem with that is because there's so much departure from the industry to other industries. I rarely see people. Everyone leaves auto and they go in-house or they go somewhere else. It's not as common that they go to another automotive agency, at least in my experience. So you have institutional knowledge that is just gone. You know it comes in and it's gone.
Speaker 2:And then you have this other issue where Google is not really telling you what you should be doing either. They used to give a lot better direction, they used to do these trainings and boot camps and they used to pay for third party Google Analytics because they didn't even offer that themselves. And then a lot of that stuff kind of went away and became incredibly ambiguous to say this is like, or it's just very hard to say, this is a good digital marketing program and this is a really crappy one because of X, y, z. Google doesn't really care. They kind of just want you to spend as much money on platform as possible and if you're too efficient, then you're that efficiency is going to cut into the for you to spend more. That that's why P max is a lot more popular now, because they're just basically trying to get you to spend more money and having and have less insight into where it's being wasted.
Speaker 2:Something really shady again that Google did, was they they? They don't show keywords, search terms that you have spent money on that have less than, I think, 10 impressions. And when we do our audits every month for wasted keywords or keyword waste, sprint through all of our customers. Most of the keywords that we've historically excluded only have three or four impressions that month, but over the course of many months it'll be a lot of impressions, but now we have zero visibility into that. So a lot of the data that we collected before this change is kind of enforcing, informing our optimizations now, but the reality is there's less visibility in how to cut the waste.
Speaker 2:I actually had an experience one time when I went to work for dealer track and they bought dealercom and there were there was a dealership in Dallas, stonebriar, chevy, and I was always working on the Huffine side. So that was like the, the, the nemesis dealer, chevy dealerships, and I like assumed that these people were total assholes because they were always cannibalizing Huffines Chevrolet, huffines Chevrolet Louisville, huffines Chevrolet Plano, right, and I was like you guys are deliberately poaching traffic. When I actually met the guy that was running their accounts, he had no idea he had been wasting money.
Speaker 2:He just had chevy plano broad match and of course everyone at the huffines organization was taking it like hey, like why are you, why are you doing that? But it's like these. This guy didn't even know what he was doing. He didn't. He wasn't even deliberately poaching traffic from his direct competitor, he was doing it accidentally and that was the yeah.
Speaker 2:So that was kind of the one funny thing is, sometimes when money is wasted, I always like, because we care so much about what we do, I assume that there is someone that is deliberately kind of, you know, not doing good work, but it's just they don't know, nobody's teaching them. Google doesn't make this information available. So essentially, what you have to have is someone in product that really knows what the hell is going on and that you've given them. But they don't have a lot of information to work with. There isn't like a paid media academy that everyone goes to and you know it's not like the bar exam or something like that. Literally, anyone can go get an AdWords certification and if you have your AdWords certification, that does not qualify you to run Google marketing for anyone, and definitely not in the automotive industry, for sure. So I think there's just a lack of good information and there's a lot of ambiguity about how to do the job right.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that you mentioned that I still have a lot of people that ask me about Google's certifications, specifically around ads. You know search, display, mobile, all that YouTube and I always tell people the same thing, like it hasn't changed in the fact that the value is understanding the theory right. Why would you choose, you know, search in this case, paid search over a display, or so can you get some useful knowledge from it? Yeah, you can, but what you just said is really the most important thing, and I think what most probably this is lots of industries, automotive that that a dealer doesn't really realize that somebody's google ad certification does not mean that they even know how to set up a campaign, let alone manage it and optimize it for best results, and that's tough. It can be a tough conversation because there are a lot of people in automotive that are really proud of having oh, everybody's certified, and so I don't disagree with that, and, as you know, there's a part of that that's tied to people that want to be in the partner program or Premier if they're chasing Premier partnership as well. So, very, very interesting.
Speaker 1:I want to ask you a little bit on waste, because you were mentioned some things that I thought were maybe under the category of audience signals, but you mentioned and I could be wrong on this, so please clarify for me. But it makes all the sense in the world that, knowing your market for especially luxury, expensive items that you know, you're going to be able to pick up some signals within your audience that will help you define in such a way that will make it so you're not wasting money trying to sell, in your example, like Bentleys to people and Mesquite versus where your more likely buyer is. And knowing a neighborhood, knowing your town, knowing that is really important Is that relative within audience signals or is there way more in that? I'm not as up to speed on the signal piece but I'm fascinated by it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a couple of components to this. One is you definitely, if you've been in business for a while, you want to upload your first party data into Google ads. You need to have, I think, the threshold of like 500 matched users. But essentially, if you've been selling cars or motorcycles for the last decade, you should easily meet that requirement and essentially, what you want to do is say, hey, google, this is data from my user that we want to upload into the account Because if people, if users, have these characteristics they're like our customer we want to target them. Now Google is changing some of the ability to use first party data, but I think there will always be some component there. But that's a very important angle. The others are super obvious. You've got household income level, you've got gender and you have age right. So, going back to our Bentley or we don't even have to go as high tier as Bentley we can go to Lexus. If you are a Lexus dealer, chances are you sell to the top 30% of income earners more like the top 15%. You never sell anything to the bottom 60 or 70 at all. Therefore, you should try to exclude that part of the pie and you should optimize your budget towards the smaller segment of people that are more likely to buy from you. And it's again, and if you're a Lexus dealer or a Bentley dealer, you're probably never selling your car to someone under the age of 40. Again, your CRM data will give you a lot of this information. I don't know if age data will be available, but typically when you look in your conversion data for a luxury car dealership or even like luxury motorcycles, you're going to see that it skews to top 20% of income earners, people that are at an age that they're going to have the means usually 30 to 50. And, of course, that product will vary massively based on what it is. But what's crazy is when you and you never see anything in there, you never see a positive bid adjustment to income level.
Speaker 2:When you do an automotive audit, it doesn't matter what it is. It could be a Lexus dealership, it could be a Toyota dealership. You are absolutely going to outperform in certain areas. And by me, let's say I'm a Lexus dealer and I say I just want to get more of the top 15%. I don't want to exclude anyone. You can do that. You can target everyone, but you can incentivize the ad platform to target your primary users more.
Speaker 2:I just did a really interesting audit for a business in Raleigh. It's a med spa and they do very expensive treatments vampire facelifts, all kinds of stuff that you and I will never do but they have been running google ads a pretty substantial budget about 12k a month for quite some time and, uh, not surprisingly, their primary customer is women. Right, uh, to the tune of 85 are women and then 50 are men, roughly in terms of their customer breakdown. They didn't have bid adjustments to say, hey, if it's a woman and they're clicking on the ad, then I'd like to spend an extra 5% because I want to be in position one, or I want to show up for that person more during those key times of the day than, say, a dude that you know wants to get Botox once or whatever.
Speaker 2:So there's always an application for audience signals refining your traffic, and the ways you can control it are hey, this is the data that comes from my CRM, uploaded via CSV, or this is the data that comes in from Google ads or analytics that says, hey, 70% of my users are in this income bracket. If you have that intelligence, absolutely act on it. If 80% of your users are in this income bracket. If you have that intelligence, absolutely act on it. If 80% of your customers are male, then you should spend more of your money on males. And here's the reality Just because most of your buyers are a gender or within a demographic, that does not mean that that is representative of the searchers right.
Speaker 2:Right, like a lot of you know, there are a lot of people that buy products, like you know, motorcycles. A lot of that shopping is done by a wife, maybe for an anniversary present or something like that. So there are these like kind of niche cases, but the vast majority of a motorcycle dealers customers, for instance, are going to be guys from a certain age to a certain age that are making a good amount of money. If you're Harley, if you're looking for a Suzuki, you can probably be anyone, definitely a little younger, less fluent but you have to understand your product and who your primary buyers are. And once you have that intelligence, you can make a massive improvement in your CPA and in the quality of your leads by just saying, hey, I want more of my best customer, I don't want to exclude anybody, I just want more of this. And there are multiple ways you can send that signal. You can send it through location bids. You can send that through audience bids to age, demographic, income level.
Speaker 2:And if you aren't doing any of them, or if your agency isn't doing any of those things, then they're not trying very hard to not waste your money, because the reality for any car dealership, for basically any industry that you're in that's B2C dealership, for any, basically any industry that you're in that's B2C, you could probably spend I mean, as a Ford dealer in Dallas, you could probably spend a hundred thousand dollars, no problem, probably. And and have it be worthwhile? Is it all going to be super profitable, cause you're probably blanketing the whole DFW area? Probably not, but you have the ability to because the volume is there and if there is such substantial volume of search for the products that you're selling, but not everyone will be a good buyer. You have to be super discerning or Google will spend your money either way, because they collect your payment on the click, it's not on the conversion. Click, it's not on the conversion it's not on the result.
Speaker 1:So much great information that you're sharing, mike, I can tell you that, um, it's always been my belief for years that, um, there are so many people providing the types of services that that you're, in it, clearly an expert in that, um, they just don't know, they haven't spent the time. All of this nuance, all of this deep level of detail, is what makes the difference. The old tagline regarding really getting into the details of paid digital advertising, where they're just like I don't want to know how the watch is built, just tell me what time it is, right, that old statement. And I have told people over the over, the, especially over the last handful of years, with, with PMAX coming in, I've said I think, now more than ever, you can't really afford to take that position of I just want to know what time it is. Don't tell me how to build a watch. But if you are a business that says but I sell cars, I sell motorcycles, how am I going to get motorcycles? How am I going to get my brain to have as much information in it and understand it the way that Mike Schaug does, because that's his game, okay, well then, you don't have to know as much as Mike, and you don't have to know as much and be as capable as Premier Online Marketing is at this, but you have to know that the Premier Online Marketing's of the world exist so that you choose somebody that can't just tell you what time it is, they know how to build the mother freaking watch.
Speaker 1:And so I'm listening to you articulate these points of value that will help anybody paying attention not waste more money if they have the courage to challenge their or even move off of the provider that they have.
Speaker 1:It's uh, it's just very, very refreshing because it gets to be in this. I think in this world you can become very cynical and you can become um, you know just, it's easy to just kind of sit back on your hands and decide it'll be what it'll be and perform to the low standard that's been set, and then you can also then realize but that's exactly how you become complacent and you become part of a norm that isn't particularly associated with high performance. So, speaking Um, speaking of that, um wanted to get your thoughts on, if you want to share about um marketing strategies that are more performance driven. Um, you know we you and I have talked about things like this many times over the years, but is that still something that you think is like there's a high level of importance on performance driven campaigns, like there's a high level of importance on performance driven campaigns.
Speaker 2:We actually don't do very much or any marketing. That is more kind of awareness or impression driven, everything that every dollar we spend for our customers, there's an expectation of CPA what is my cost per acquisition? And essentially you want it to be flat or better year over year. So that is kind of a very good touchstone for marketers and for clients alike. To kind of rally around. It's like how much does it cost us to get a lead Right? And so basically the marketing channels that we like the most are going to be associated with that.
Speaker 2:So on the Google side, we do like search. We love Google search. I think that is by far the best product. There is a kind of a customized version of Google search which is called call only. This is a click to call. To call format. You can go to the website as well, but we find that it converts extremely well for a lot of customers. Most local businesses that are in lead generation can accept forms for sure, and we obviously track forms and we like them. But people tend to want to convert on their terms and filling out a application form in your car in traffic is probably not a good idea, so they'll just pick up the phone and call. In your car in traffic is probably not a good idea, so we'll just pick up the phone and call. So when we're looking at performance, I see for most of our clients it's probably 80 to 85% phone and then the other 20 to 15% is going to be form-based. So search call only. That kind of covers the main strategies that we really like.
Speaker 2:I've talked about display a couple of times on this in this conversation and the thing that I'll say is like we are not. Like we are not anti any platform. We just see flat certain channels that are less good at driving the results that you want, which is a good CPA. So to that end, the Google Display Network is something that we really do not like to use. We like remarketing. If they've been to the website before, maybe through a search campaign or through social media or through organic channels, and they looked at our inventory, then sure, let's get in front of them with a. I guess it would be on the display network but it would be gated through. They've been to my website, however, when we've done other things, like targeting car enthusiasts or you know, whatever the audience segment is, it's just a huge waste of money.
Speaker 2:You know, google display doesn't seem to be a very good way of addressing the in-market buyer, certainly not as good as someone typing in a keyword and saying, hey I'm here, market to me. So we, like remarketing, don't love display. Even though the ad sizes are the same, the targeting method is different. Our new favorite strategy is going to be YouTube with custom intent. Previously, if you were running advertising and someone doesn't click on your ads which about 80% of people don't click on ads at any given time, meaning that that's a ton of people that you just never get in front of they scroll past, you go to the organic results and you lose that person. If they don't click on you, you don't get to cookie them. So now that is addressable. If someone does a search, you can upload custom intent lists, keyword lists, basically and then you can target them with a video. That is a super effective way at kind of doing prospecting. You can even use more broad keywords like car dealership, things that you would never do in your core search campaigns. You can target that person because sure they looked for you and now it costs, you know, 20 cents or whatever, to show this person a 15 to 30 second ad. The impression quality on YouTube, I would argue, is the highest. It's if, if, if you give me three seconds per impression three seconds on a search ad, three seconds on a call only ad, three seconds on a display ad or a few seconds on a you know, a YouTube ad that the the quality of what is conveyed through video is just so much higher Search ads, even though they perform really well from a lead standpoint. If I'm trying to give someone a kind of answer their question but also show them how cool the product is that they're looking for, like a Polaris Razor or Can-Am, I'd rather do that in a cool video of someone ripping through a dune than do that through a static display ad or even through a text. Ad're all important, but um, youtube used to be thought of much more as like awareness top of funnel. Um, people call it still. They'll be like oh, that's like a funny, fun money budget or whatever, but um, it's. It's actually become quite an effective way of driving leads from people that are a little bit colder in the audience. Search leads tend to be very warm. They've been doing a lot of research for a while. By the time they're looking for Lexus lease deals, dallas or something like that. They've done a ton of research, so that's an easy person to go after with search. But when they're at the top of that journey and they're saying best luxury SUV, that's a. You know that would be an extremely expensive endeavor. To do that through search, it would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, whereas you can do that through YouTube very effectively, targeting people at, you know, the very bottom of the funnel or at the top.
Speaker 2:Another one for YouTube is just YouTuber marketing. If someone has been to your website for, let's say, more, you know, let's just say they've been to your website. For the benchmark, let's say the average duration of a automotive visit is a minute 34 seconds. Then set that as one of the parameters. They have to have been on the website for you know this amount of time and they had to have gone to a couple of pages. You can do a lot of things with your audience setup to basically say, okay, you can do very dumb remarketing, which is anyone that comes to our homepage, you're going to go see our ad for the next three weeks. Or if you've come to the page, you've looked at the specific inventory that we're selling. You've been to a couple of other pages. You can actually create a custom audience of those activities and market to them specifically with a video ad for the vehicle that they are looking for, if you have the video available.
Speaker 2:If you have the video available, yeah, so those tend to be the main makeups of our Google strategy. On the meta side, we do like what tends to work better is the native leads in meta and Instagram. Those tend to work a lot better than traffic campaigns, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that Google doesn't really do attribution well for other platforms. If you look in Google Analytics for performance reports on social, you're always going to get an F, and if you go to meta, you're like, wow, I guess all my sales came from meta. But they'll both take credit for the same sale. They're both tracking them in similar ways and if they touch it, if they, if someone sees a fraction of an impression, then Facebook will be like that's definitely me that got that lead. So sometimes you can have uh channels kind of dueling for for uh, the attribution.
Speaker 1:Uh, some great, really really great tips and thanks for sharing some of what you guys are doing. That's definitely high level and I'm sure your clients are. Hopefully they are appreciative of you guys going to that length to get results for them. We've been on approach here to land the episode for a couple minutes. A couple things that I just the last couple things. A landing episode for a couple minutes a couple things that I just the last couple things. Audience we'll get to way more. There was so much more to get to, but this is the first of many. So if you're, by the way, if you're consuming this on YouTube, like it and subscribe so you'll know when the next episode comes out.
Speaker 1:But I wanted to ask, mike and I hope I'm not offering something that your company doesn't do but when we talk about the things that we have on this episode, there's usually at least somebody out there thinking how can I find out if what I'm doing is actually good or is there a lot of waste? And you and I, before it was even popular, we boy, we were commissioning a lot of complimentary or free, no obligation audits for people, and I know some people have turned this into, you know, the kind of the laziest and not very, very high quality effort to try to, you know, generate leads or whatever. But my question to you is are you still kind of doing the same thing that we used to do way back, where we do a really quality, no obligation audit? For anybody that might be listening to this saying man, could somebody tell me the truth before I write checks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah. That's the best customer because we have a benchmark of before and after. So we do offer audits for SEM or Google ads and social platforms as well, and SEO Collect together or individually. We don't charge for these things for customers that are potentially looking to work with us, but our paid search audits we'll put like a couple of hours of work into that. There's usually about 10 or 15 slides with a lot of information that can be pretty revelatory to a business owner. So that's, it's a super.
Speaker 2:I love presenting them, they're great, and I always say this that if your digital marketing is managed well, then we don't want your business. There's so much poorly run marketing in the automotive industry and all the industries that we serve that if there's another good player in the space and they're doing a good job, we'll let you know that you're doing a good job. If your KPIs are within kind of industry standards, we'll let you know that too. But if we go into the account, we don't see ad schedules. We don't see location exclusions. We see spend all over the world. We see spend during all times of the day. We don't see conversion tracking implemented correctly. We're going to let you know about that too, version tracking implemented correctly. We're going to let you know about that too. So, no matter what agency you work with, you would probably benefit from-.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. I'm glad to hear that you guys are still doing that. Just a quick story, because you and I were at the same. We've been at this same company a couple of times, but the last same company that we were at, um. For those that know, no, otherwise you don't, you'll just have to guess. But um, do you remember the story where one of your fantastic audits we I ended up making a video about it where somebody had they thought they had a gotcha on it.
Speaker 1:It was a chrysler, jeep, dodge, ram dealer and the audit unveiled that they were spending a whole lot of money on Jeep or it was Ram keywords, but they didn't have the Ram brand. They were just Chrysler, jeep, dodge, no Ram. And they thought they got us on a gotcha, like we don't even sell Ram. And we got to say, uh well, you might want to tell and I won't even name the provider because everyone will know who they are you might want to tell them because you've been spending about $16,000 every quarter or so on a brand that you don't even sell. It was. It was yeah, I love that, yeah absolutely.
Speaker 2:I remember that well. It was a yeah, a chrysler jeep dodge ram dealer that was not selling rams or jeeps one of those two and the vast majority of what they had been spending on was that and all the performance data looked beautiful and rosy when you looked at the report, but when you actually looked at the keyword data, all of it was going to Jeep terms and they didn't have even any and their used inventory. So I remember that being a really hilarious takeaway for uh person that became a client for sure. Um, that they were they.
Speaker 2:They thought they got us in a gotcha, but we were actually just showing them their own data and they hadn't even seen it for themselves, because their agency partner was not being transparent about what keywords and it can be.
Speaker 1:it can be very, very difficult to delicately dance around those things that can come from those audits, and there are also a lot of people that do them kind of similar. You mentioned people that just do like the very least amount of SEO that they can. There are also people that do audits that are really nothing more than really lazy sales tools for lazy salespeople that aren't really good at articulating the value of their services. So how would somebody that wants to take advantage of that, what's the best way for somebody that says you know what? Yeah, I'll take you up on that, I want to. I'd love for your agency to audit our, our, our, our stuff. So what's the best way to for them to engage?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Reach out to us via phone or via form on our website. Our website is premieronlinemarketingcom and we would love to talk to you and I guess, like in terms of, if you're looking for an agency that is really dialed in, that is really paying attention to what the products are doing right now and is really looking to get you more efficiency, get you more leads out of your same budget, that is us and it is not us or our competitors.
Speaker 1:There was so much more to get to on this episode to the audience listening and or watching. Thanks for tuning in. Come back. If you want more information, just to check out on Premier Online Marketing, you can go to premieronlinemarketingcom. No fancy spelling, it's exactly the way all of those words are spelled. There's no spaces. There's nothing fancy other than premieronlinemarketingcom. You can get a lot more information on what Mike and the Palm team are doing. You can schedule a consultation to talk with those guys. But, as I just mentioned and wanted to find out with clarity from Mike, you can also take them up on a no obligation, meaning it's a totally free audit.
Speaker 1:We used to do this years ago and Mike's continued to do it at his company, premier Online Marketing. I highly recommend that you take advantage of that, even if you maybe are like I don't know if we'd make a move, but know the truth. That's oftentimes the biggest thing. Missing in your business is people are not telling you the truth, and there's only a handful of diamonds among all the coal in our industry. Mike's one of the diamonds. So I hope you'll continue to come back and tune in for future episodes of the palm cast. Is this one? Well, we've found the perfect place to park it. We appreciate comments and questions as we build quality content for this audience. We want that, that we crave that, so we're asking for you if you've got a comment or a question, please feel free to share it. Your feedback will help us deliver more relevant episodes as we continue in the future. Until then, thanks for tuning into this episode and we'll see you soon right back here on the Palmcast. And then we'll just wait for it. I'll stop it.