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Sad Rant: Google Updates are crushing my clients
Posted by on August 24, 2021 at 9:50 pmStruggling lately! We’re a small agency that services small business with ad budget on the small side (usually less than $1,000/month). We typically focus on providing low cost options for businesses that want to acquire the lowest hanging fruit. Typically local service based businesses.
The new updates are killing us and our clients. The majority of our keywords are now flagged for low search volume (lots of exact match) and I’m finding that QS’s are suffering from manual CPC.
And then if you try to go the broad match route and build out a huge negative search term base, Google cuts off 50 – 60% of the search query data so you can’t even asses the quality of search your campaign is buying.
Top it off with CPC’s that are seemingly sky rocketing – mainly due to Google’s push to get everyone on automated bidding (I think) – and we’re getting to the point where we can hardly even recommend Google anymore. Looking for a pivot but I’m not sure where to go at this point.
Anyways, not sure why I’m posting but I had to get it off my chest today. Frustrating stuff. If anyone else is struggling like we are, I’m happy to connect to learn some new best practices.
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14 Replies
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Historical data should help you find top-performing keywords. Pull them down and create an exact match and double down the bids on them.
The phrase is catching almost all BMM keywords. Use that.
As far as the SQR, I don’t know when you check but they have started showing SQR for 0 Impression as well. I have seen this in all types of accounts – Small & Large media spend. -
Google Ads doesn’t work good with small budgets like it used to. I believe there was an article recently talking about how it isn’t very small budget friendly for most businesses now
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I’m in the same niche, I work with small budget contractors, interested in knowing some solutions…
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Google wants to destroy smaller clients. Capitalism needs to monopolise if its going to survive
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Yeah double check those Search Queries. In my accounts, at least, I’m seeing a lot more days in the last couple weeks then they used to.
I feel your pain though with low volume keywords.
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Don’t forget you can still put some niche search term data by using Google Analytics > Google Ads > Search Queries after the account is connected
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Run local services ads. Google almost always gives priority to their newest ad options.
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Try Josh Nelson’s 7 figure agency group on fb. Great resource. Ditto his book.
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I feel your pain.
I find that with low budgets I can get good results by doing phrase match, impression share bidding 100%, anywhere on the page, bid 50-75% of average CPC. Enable all languages & search partners.
With the low volume searches I find that playing around with keywords can help out. For example if [cheap plumber near me] is low volume, try variations, [cheap plumbers near me] [cheapest plumber near me] etc. and a lot of times I find one that works.
And with how broad Google is now, those are definitely all the same term as far as they’re concerned.
With a small budget find your best days, times of day, searches & make sure you’re showing up #1 during those times.
Also look at historical data to see if you can cut out waste. Look for low converting zip codes, searches, demographics, days, devices.
With QS I usually look for anything below a 5 and make a new ad group with specific ads/landing page just for it which improve over time.
Good luck!
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Yes ‘smart’ bidding means my shares in Alphabet are looking good.
But for you, me and most of my clients, looking for other high performance channels is a necessity. -
First thing there’s no alternative to Google, Bing You can’t spend 100$ a month.
Secondly I run many small business campaigns, even my own Digital Marketing services, I work with maximize clicks with a bid cap and Initially I test for one day different different bids, Once I get to know I fix that and never run for number 1 position. Call only campaign works well but higher cpc’s with calls.
It also depends on what are you targeting, creative communication, have you tried bidding on Audiences on search like a little higher so that system works. There are tactics, don’t get frustrated but try different things there’s always a hack
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It’s definitely changing rapidly and there is not nearly as much control as their used to be, which is a negative for small advertisers. That said I haven’t seen the costs go up that much. There is a lot more frequency of low bids on junk terms but in aggregate conversion volume is still there and cost per conversion is acceptable. I’ve found audience focus is working more than keyword focus these days.
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Can you (or someone) explain how QS and manual bidding are related?
Is it just because Google bids lower on poor queries which increases expected (and actual) Ctrs?
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We work in the senior housing industry, which has been HUGELY impacted by targeting limits due to being associated with real estate AND healthcare in some cases. No age targeting, zip targeting, income, etc.. but we’ve found age makeup of our traffic is still very similar due to behavior and interest of the audience. We’ve also run into random issues like brand campaigns not serving for months with no answers, TCPA campaigns that have worked wonderfully for months and months suddenly not even spending the daily budgets, and random ad policy violations that get overturned. Support has been ZERO help on anything – they just copy and paste text from Google’s policy pages that I can find myself in 90 seconds. Alas, they’re the only real game in town and they have all of us by the balls. Like another poster said, we still see the ROI there, so we carry on.
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