Google Ads Management: Location Optimization

0:00:00
What’s up everybody? Welcome back. We are now going to look at yet another aspect of the Google ads optimization process. In this episode, we are going to be optimizing for location. But what I want to do before we actually get to the optimization techniques and steps is I want to take a look at the results of the campaign thus far. So I have the date set from the very beginning of the campaign the day we launched May 20th, 2022 and it is through today October 5th, 2022. And these are the basic results. There’s been 477 clicks. There’s been seven lead form submissions at a cost of $386 per lead and we’ve spent a total of $3,500. Now, because we are doing this as a training, I’ll say this again and say it multiple times just so everybody’s clear, I have not been doing the optimizations up to this point because I’ve been waiting to be able to record the optimizations as I do them. And I have not had a lot of free time to focus on these Google ads. So there’s just it’s just kind of sitting here burning money, not being optimized while we wait on the time to be able to do it. And I’m going to do the actual trainings with that said, I am 100% confident that this is actually we’ve gotten more than seven leads for sure. So in the very beginning when I set up the campaign, this was the conversion page or that the page we wanted them to fill the form out on. And if you remember back, there was actually a tab system, they could use Calendly, which was the defaults, they could schedule through Calendly or they could tab over and fill out a form. Well, a lot of people did use Calendly and unfortunately Calendly takes people off of your domain, it routes them through the Calendly domain and then it redirects them back to your domain. And we were losing conversion tracking inside of that process and I’ve done a lot of looking around online and research on how to make sure that Calendly submissions track properly into Google ads. And I have not found anything concrete on how to make it work and I did a bunch of tests and I’ve not been able to make the conversions track properly when they route through Calendly. So if any of you do know how to make sure that leads track properly through Calendly’s domain, I’m all ears, let me know. But my solution to the problem was take away the Calendly and actually add it on the second step on the back end of the form submission. So now what we have is just the form by itself. Now leads are tracking consistently and properly.

0:02:46
So people fill out the form and hit send message, the very next screen, which is the confirmation invites them to schedule the call directly with me on Calendly so they don’t have to wait for anybody to respond to their inquiry. So I’m still using Calendly. I still think Calendly is a really good option, but because it was messing with the actual conversion tracking, I took it off of the first step. After the lead is actually tracked as a conversion, then people are invited to use Calendly and get on the schedule and they have been doing that too. So it works just the same in my opinion. You know, I didn’t compare before and after using the tab system with just the form system, but whatever. It’s working well enough. And so my main point here to tell you is when this says seven conversions, there’s actually more conversions that just were not tracked. And then the cost per conversion is going to be obviously lower because there were more of them for the same budget. So these numbers are a little off, but they’re still good reference numbers. And another reason why I had to wait so long is not just because I haven’t had enough time to do these trainings on Google Ads specifically is because we have to have conversion data in order to do the optimizations. If you’re doing the optimizations without conversion data, it’s, you know, there’s not a lot to work with when you’re doing a campaign like this. However, it just kind of goes to show you this is a really important point, I think, that we slapped up a campaign. The website that we’re sending the traffic to is effectively a one page website with a case study and no portfolio. Just here we are one review. There’s one review here. And so it’s not even like the landing pages and even optimized. And we’re still working. And I’ve converted at least two of these leads into projects. So when the total cost is $3,500, I mean, we’ve obviously we’ve made a great ROI. This has been well worth it. And that’s one of the reasons why I haven’t been too concerned with just letting it be here even though it’s not optimized is because I already made money on it. So it’s doing just fine. Now I do want to optimize it. You always want to make more money for the cost, but that’s what we’re going to get to.

0:05:05
It wasn’t a pressing thing because I’d already made the money on it. So again, goes to show you it didn’t take any crazy strategy or anything else. We kind of, you know, we designed it. We didn’t really design anything. We just put together a basic PPC campaign, sent it to a basic one page website. And here we are with the results. So let’s move on to the actual optimization side of this training, which is location based optimization. So I am in the one and only campaign that we have here. And if you remember your locations are controlled at the campaign level. So there are three different ad groups in here. But your ad group does not control the location, the campaign controls the location. So you want to be in the campaigns tab. If I go into an ad group, you’re going to see here, I lose the location link inside of my sidebar. So if you’re clicking on an ad group and you’re like, I want to optimize the locations, that’s not where that happens. That happens at the campaign level. And again, this is, I’ll say this numerous times Google ads is not good UX whatsoever. So it’s like, all right, how do I get back to the campaign screen? Are you got to kind of click on this drop down, even though it’s not really a drop down that’s actually a link inside there. It looks like a drop down. It kind of is a drop down. But you can also just click the link right there. And now I’m back in the campaign dashboard, which is, you know, there’s no headline. It says search keywords. There’s no like it should be the name of the campaign that you’re in and looking at. Right. If I go to overview, it just says overview. It’s not telling me what I’m over viewing. I have to look up here into this campaign tab and see that I’m over viewing this campaign. But then again, look, I go into web design here. And it still says I’m in this campaign. It still says just search keywords. It still just says overview. But I’m really in an ad group now. And so if you’re not paying really close attention to this kind of fancy breadcrumb that they’ve got going on up here, you really have no context as to where you’re at in the dashboard. So just another nitpick and complaint, but it is in my opinion, just not good whatsoever, especially for beginners. So here I am in the campaign tab and I am going to go under locations right here and you’re going to see the key reason why I broke these out into individual areas. Could I have said target a 30 mile radius around Atlanta? Yes. Then I would have one line item right here that says 30 miles around Atlanta, Georgia. That probably would have covered all of these areas. But instead what I did is I did 10 miles around very specific areas in the Metro Atlanta area. And what that gives me is a lot of granularized data. Is that even a word granularized? It gives me a lot of granular data. And also along with that granular data, the ability to optimize per radius, per targeting area.

0:08:09
So for example, we’re going to take a look over here at the cost that’s being spent in each area. More importantly, the number of conversions from each area and the cost per conversion in each area. So what I want to do here is I want to back up to my overview dashboard and I want to highlight this right here. 386 dollars cost per conversion. We already said it’s actually lower than that because some of the conversions weren’t tracked. But let’s just pretend that that’s real. That we’re actually getting 386 dollars as our cost per conversion. If you just look at that and you’re like, OK, that’s maybe that’s exactly your target. That’s what you wanted. And the client is like, I wanted to spend less than $400 for a conversion. You’re like, cool, we’re hitting that all as well in the world. No, you can’t stop here. There are more things that we need to do to optimize because we can still probably get this number to be lower, maybe even a lot lower. And these different optimization sets that I’m teaching you is exactly how we do that. In the locations tab specifically, I want you to look at something. The 10 mile radius around Atlanta, Georgia shows a cost per conversion of almost $1,200 dollars. That is four times the cost we were just looking at there. So if I keep running ads in the Atlanta, Georgia area, obviously I’m getting, you know, the vast majority of clicks there, the vast majority of impressions. And only one conversion, that area is just not converting very well. It’s costing me $1,200 to get a conversion from the 10 miles around Atlanta, Georgia targeting radius. So if I want to optimize this campaign, what I would do is I would remove that all together. I don’t you could bid adjust it down, but it’s just it’s soaking up too many dollars. And people in that area just don’t seem to be liking what I have to offer. I don’t want to pay nearly that much for a conversion. So I’m going to stop running ads in that one specific radius area. Now I’m left with Mary at a Georgia, it’s actually about 45 minutes away from me. But the cost per conversion, I’m actually liking that. And they appear to be liking my ads and what my website says. So I’m going to keep that area. Right. What about John’s Creek, Georgia? I’ve got one conversion at 531. That’s the second highest location. What I may do here is I may just decrease my bid in that area. So if I happen to get conversions in that area, hopefully they’ll be at a lower cost. So I’m going to decrease that by let’s do 35%. Just as a test. We’ll just do a bid adjustment of minus 35 in John’s Creek. All right. Buford Georgia, that’s actually where I’m located. And that I got one conversion at a cost of $400. I don’t have a lot of choices here. I want to keep running ads in my area because it’s important to me. You know, $400 for a lead. If it’s a good lead, I’ll take that. Okay. Now again, these numbers are not accurate because these are based on the conversions that were actually tracked. And we already talked about. There’s been more conversions than that. It’s actually lower than that. So I’m keeping that in mind when I’m saying I’m just going to keep this area as it is. Then we have Lawrenceville, Georgia at $409 per conversion. I’ve gotten one there. And then 10 miles around coming Georgia. Look at this. Two conversions out of 10 clicks at a cost of $51. So you know what? I may increase my bid adjustment here by 25%. Maybe even maybe even 35% and you know, I’ll say, you know what? I’ll pay even higher for leads in that area. They seem to like what I have to offer. And I’m at a really good cost per conversion already.

0:12:15
Let’s just see if I can get more activity in that area, perhaps. And then 10 miles around Sandy Springs is just doing absolutely nothing for me. Now in this case, it appears that either there’s not a lot of volume in that area in general. Or Google has simply decided that that area is just not converting very well. And it’s not going to waste my money on that area. And so it’s kind of just running a very minimum level of ads in that area. It could be also though that I’m just not, you know, maybe my budget is run out because of the Atlanta issue. That’s another thing, right? The another reason why I got rid of Atlanta is because every ad that runs in Atlanta, not only if it gets a conversion is going to cost me a lot more money, but it’s taking my budget away from these other areas that I could be spending in that are performing much better. All right. Now there are times where you may not know exactly which locations you want to target. And obviously if you’re if your area is very, very large, it can be tedious to go in here and just pick out, you know, different cities within that area and plug them in. You don’t have to do all of this stuff ahead of time. So I want to show you one other area of location optimization. Let’s say that you were running ads all throughout the state of Georgia. Now I’m not doing that in this account. So the results that we’re about to look at are going to be a little bit manipulated because I am targeting specific granular areas. But let’s pretend that I had just been targeting all of Georgia with my ads. Notice this drop down right here that says targeted locations. You can change this to matched locations and matched locations is going to show you where people are when they click your ads. Even it’ll show you that granular data, even if you didn’t pre program in for those that granular targeting. Okay. So you’re going to see that it starts out in United States. And if I click on this, it’s going to ask me how I want to narrow this down. And you actually have a lot of different options. So you can do it by region by state by a Nielsen DMA region. You can do it by congressional districts, counties, municipalities, cities, postal codes, airports like people are they near airports, which airport of the near burrows, city regions, neighborhoods near universities and districts. There’s a lot of different ways that you can go about this. I’m doing city based targeting. So let’s just click on cities. And here are the cities that actually triggered my ads. And you can see all the same data here. We have your total cost spent in that area. Your conversion rate in that area, the number of conversions and your cost per conversion. You can see here there was a click in Smirna, Georgia that actually got me a conversion. And it was only $113 for that conversion. I don’t think I’m targeting Smirna, Georgia specifically. Let’s go back and just double check. So we’ll go to this tab. Let’s just see what comes up here. So Smirna, Georgia is close to one of these cities, but it’s not actually in that city, but it’s in the radius. Okay. So remember, these are cities plus a radius. So Smirna is in that radius. And I’m seeing because I’m looking at matched data now that somebody actually was in Smirna. And so that is a conversion at a fairly good cost and a good conversion right here. So I can say add targets and set bit adjustments. So now I can actually bid adjust Smirna up by 35% and I’ll hit apply there.

0:15:48
And so now I’m actually able to access this granular data after the fact. And okay, good. I thought Google ads was about to bug out on me. Sometimes it does that. Not a great platform. But this is a way for you to access that granular data and still perform your optimizations even if you didn’t set the granular targeting up ahead of time. So this is just a little bit of a test. You got to play around with this and see how this all plays out. And this is why it’s also important to document things. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go over here into base camp, but I’m going to show you something else. I’m going to go to digital gravy age. Actually, I’m not going to go think I have a, yeah, a normal digital gravy. All right, and there’s not a lot of activity in here because I’m doing a lot with this stuff, but I’m going to go to docs and files and I’m going to make a new folder and this is going to be called advertising. And I’m going to hit save and then I’m going to open that folder and I’m going to start a new doc and this is going to be Google ads. And I’m going to put the name of the campaign web design and development. All right. And then I am going to basically just post the doc. I don’t want to notify anybody. It really doesn’t need any, you can put a description, you can put some other information. But right now, I’m just going to show you what I do in general. Now, when I, when I first create a campaign, I do go in here and just kind of put the details of how I set up the campaign and locations being targeted and things like that. Mainly it’s this comment thread that I use to do updates. So because when I post a comment, it’s going to date stamp it for me and it’s going to keep just a nice running list of changes that have been made to the add account. So what did we do today? We removed Atlanta targeting and then I just say cost to cost per conversion to high using too much budget. Okay. So I remove the Atlanta targeting and I’ll say Atlanta plus 10 targeting because it was it was Atlanta plus 10 miles of a radius around Atlanta. What else did I do? I bid adjusted Johns Creek down minus 35% also bid adjusted. John’s Creek minus 35% and then I also bid adjusted coming Georgia up 35% bid adjusted coming plus 35% and then I’m going to hit add this comment. So now I have a record of exactly what I did on the day and time so that if I log in in three days and things are haywire, I know exactly what I perhaps need to undo, right? Or when the numbers look a lot better, we can attribute that to doing specific things within the account.

0:18:37
So if you have a project management tool, especially if you want your clients to be involved in this is really good for your clients to see when I have a campaign that has been running for weeks and weeks and I’ve been doing adjustments and optimizations, you know, every few days, it’s a really good for the client to be able to log in and see that running list of like, oh wow, it’s not just all talk when when they told me they were going to optimize my Google ads campaign. They weren’t just saying that it’s not some like, you know, nebulous type like what are they actually doing behind the scenes. It’s all documented exactly what we’re doing. We could have done the negative keywords as well documented adding those to the account when we did that training way back when. And then as we continue to do optimizations going forwards, I’ll add those here and you’ll start to see how they build up, right? But this is going to be the end of the location based targeting. It’s one of the most important areas to optimize within Google again because it gives you the specific performance indicators by area, by region, by radius, however you decide to set it up. And that’s very, very important because these are absolutely different markets. They behave in different ways. And so it makes sense that they have different performance values attached to them and you want to be able to optimize for that. So again, that’s location optimization inside of Google ads. Cheers.