Inside Google Ads podcast: Special Episode 12 - Rapid-fire Reddit

Can you guess which corner of the internet has some of the most spirited PPC discussions? While LinkedIn and X are great sources of Google Ads expertise, nothing comes close to Reddit.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I am not on Reddit, anonymous corners of the internet scare me, but one of my PPC besties, Amalia Fowler, is very active on Reddit, and she suggested that I do an episode answering Reddit questions.

I loved the idea. 

And, she was kind enough to send me screenshots of the most interesting, controversial questions about Google Ads.

So today, Episode 12 of Inside Google Ads, I'm answering 10 burning questions from Reddit about keywords, conquesting, budget limits, bid strategies, and more.

And to keep things extra spicy, I have not prepared notes for my answers in advance like I usually do, so let's see how I stack up against the anonymous commenters.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent years working for other brands at Google. Now, I work for you. This is Inside Google Ads Rapid-fire Reddit edition.

Let's go! 

Our first question comes from r/PPC. “Google is serving our ads for a competitor that we aren't bidding on. How does it make sense that Google would serve our ads when someone searches for another brand, and we aren't bidding on that competitor's brand keyword? If I was that brand, I would be ticked. The problem is, if that brand searches on their name and sees our ad, they're gonna think that we are bidding on their brand name, so they don't know to complain to Google.”

This is so entertaining for me. Okay. 

“Isn't this just Google inflating bids for brands while also making us pay for clicks we didn't want in the first place? Seems illegal to me. And yes, our keywords are on Phrase or Exact Match.” 

So this person is complaining because they are serving Search ads on competitor searches, even though they are not using the competitor’s brand name as a keyword.

I hate to break it to this commenter on r/PPC, but even though your keywords are in Phrase or Exact Match, you can still serve on search terms for competitors because of how Google has been loosening up the way match types work recently.

This is not illegal.

It is not Google inflating bids for brands. And if you don't want to do this, you just need to… well, it doesn’t exactly fix the problem, but even if this is happening to you on Exact Match, you just need to look at your search terms report and add those competitor brand names as negatives, and then it won't happen again. 

And keep in mind, if you're running Performance Max, this could be happening and you would have no idea because it may not show up in your search themes report and there is no search terms report on PMax. So, something to keep in mind as well. 

If you don't want to advertise on competitor names, you will have to add them as negatives and make sure when you add them as a negative, you add it in either Phrase Match or Exact Match, not just in Broad match.

Alright, question two is also from r/PPC. “Phrase and Exact Match together. Is it worth it? Is there a benefit to having both Exact and Phrase practice for one and the same keyword, or does it suffice to have only Phrase Match that will also cover cases when people search for the exact keyword?”

So let's say your keyword is “google ads course”. Do you need to have that in Phrase Match and Exact Match?

Should you? Should you not? And why? 

If you have it in Phrase Match, it will cover all instances where the Exact Match keyword could serve, plus the additional instances of Phrase Match.

So, I generally don't recommend mixing Phrase and Exact Match of the same keyword in the same campaign because they're going to compete against each other for the Exact Match instances.

And I don't mean to compete against each other in a way that will increase your bid. It's not going to increase auction prices, but it just won’t be a very clean way to get data on which one works better. 

If in doubt, Phrase is usually my Goldilocks solution of where I like to start, and then if I'm getting too much irrelevant traffic coming in through Phrase, I will switch it to Exact.

However, if you're working with a very modest budget, and you only have a few keywords, maybe you would want to then start with Exact, and then if you're kind of maxing out your opportunities, switch to Phrase.

So, you can absolutely put Phrase and Exact Match versions of the same keyword in the same ad group together. But is it worth it? Do you need to? 

No. 

For best practice, for lack of a better word, I generally don't recommend doing that. 

Next one, also from r/PPC, “Should I exclude branded keywords from other campaigns in search terms when running a Branded campaign?

I have a DSA campaign where branded keywords are performing great, giving me lots of conversions. Should I exclude that keyword since I have a Branded campaign?”

So, to simplify what this person is saying, they're running a Dynamic Search Ad campaign, which if we're really describing that accurately would be a Dynamic Ad group in a Search campaign.

And that means, a Dynamic Ad group, that Google is looking at your website or certain parts of your website to decide what searches to show on. You haven't given that ad group any keywords. 

And what's happening when this user is checking their search terms report on that Dynamic Ad group is they're seeing a lot of Branded Searches come in and being captured, which makes sense. That's obviously part of your website.

So should they exclude Brand from their Dynamic Ad group? My response to this is yes – especially if you have a separate brand campaign already – and that is because the purpose of a Dynamic Ad group, or DSA, is to get you additional traffic and searches that you may not otherwise get.

That's one reason to use it. 

Another reason can just be simplified management. If your website is well-optimized, but Brand isn't really bringing you anything incremental, especially if you already have a brand campaign.

And because of the way DSAs work and how relevant those ads tend to be to those users, they tend to get a high click-through rate.

So, if you have a Brand campaign, I recommend adding your brand keywords as negatives to your DSA, so you're not duplicating effort there. Kind of similar to the last question asked. 

If you don't have a Brand campaign, then you can decide if you want that to be captured in your DSA, or if you want to start a Brand campaign to keep that traffic separate.

Because Brand and Non-Brand traffic do perform so differently, I generally recommend keeping those in separate campaigns with separate budgets.

A friendly reminder that you can get the transcript of Inside Google Ads delivered to your inbox each week. Simply go to jyll.ca/insidegoogleads. That's J-Y-L-L dot ca or follow the link in the episode description. It's completely free. 

Okay, we were just on r/PPC. We're heading over to r/Google Ads for a Quality Score question. 

“I currently have a keyword ranked 8 out of 10 for Quality Score, but I don't have this keyword mentioned in my headlines. Ad Relevance is showing above average, and I'm stumped as to how this is possible. It is a Long-tail keyword consisting of five words, and my headline does contain one of the five words, but is that enough to make my Ad Relevance above average?”

So, my first thought when reading this question is: who cares?

And I don't mean that to sound rude. It's just like, okay, Ad Relevance is above average. Why are we still focusing on this? 

I'm sure there are plenty of other things in the account that are not above average and that don't have a high Quality Score that we could be focusing on.

Basically, they are saying, how can I have such a good Ad Relevance when my keyword is not in my headline? Especially because the keyword is five words long, it can't be in the headline. 

So there are two things to say about this, besides “who cares?”

The first is to remember that Quality Score is a diagnostic tool, and on a keyword-by-keyword level, it's not always perfectly accurate or perfectly indicative.

It is much more effective, I'll say, to look at Quality Score across a group of keywords, like across an ad group, and from there determine where are your strong areas and where are areas for improvement.

So, that's the first thing I'll say. 

The second thing I'll say here is you could still have high Ad Relevance because you still have part of that keyword in the ad, and that is the most important part.

And Ad Relevance isn't just about keywords and ads, it's also about ad and landing page. Now, ad and landing page would affect all keywords in the ad group, not just this specific keyword, which is another reason I recommend analyzing Quality Score at the ad group level. By that, I mean, looking at all the keywords within the ad group together rather than analyzing on a keyword by keyword basis. 

So, good for you that you have a strong Quality Score. Good for you that it's above average. There are a few reasons it's going to be happening, but honestly, it doesn't matter. Move on to more important things!

I would not be this snarky, by the way, with the questions you all asked me on social media. So, it’s kind of fun to do it this way. It’s why I'm not including the anonymous usernames of the people who ask these questions because they did not ask to be included like this, like you all do when you comment on my socials.

Next question from r/Google Ads. “Does Quality Score reduce CPC for non-exact search terms? I had read somewhere that an increase in Quality Score can reduce CPCs by 50 to 70%. It can be very doable and has an impact on Exact Match since Quality Score is measured on Exact Match” - I'll explain that in a moment - “but if you are running Broad Match, how much impact can it have on CPC? Does it improve CPC for non-exact search terms?”

So there are a lot of assumptions in this question that I'm going to break down before I get to answering it.

Match type does not affect Quality Score. So if you have a keyword like “Google Ads course” on Broad Match and Phrase Match and Exact Match, same Quality Score because it's treating it like an Exact Match when it's determining that Quality Score.

And then this claim they had in here that increasing your Quality Score can reduce CPCs by 50% to 70%. I've never heard of that before, but it is true that increasing your Quality Score can decrease your CPCs. Good on them, for calling that out. 

So, does Quality Score reduce CPC for non-exact search terms? Quality Score is determined by keyword, not by search terms.

I think they're saying, if you're running Broad Match, how much impact does change in quality have on CPC? It can have an impact as well, right?

So, improving your Quality Score has an impact regardless of the match type you're using. I think what this person is really getting at is: should I be focusing on Quality Score even if I'm not using Exact Match keywords? And the answer, in my opinion, is yes.

Though I'm sure if I were on Reddit, there would be a lot of people who said otherwise. 

Okay, next question from r/Google Ads. “How to stop keywords appearing in my headline. Just wondering if this happens to you. The keywords that you put become headlines. It's happening to my Google Ads and I can't seem to find a way to fix it. It would be okay if the keywords were structured really good, but most of the keywords I used were broken English and I put them there because they're the top searches. Can someone please help? I've watched a ton of videos and I tried their suggestions but can't seem to figure out how to fix it.”

Okay, so their keywords are appearing in the headline and they don't want them to, and they say they've watched a ton of videos and haven’t been able to figure it out.

I'm going to throw a few things out there why this could be.

The most obvious would be if you have Dynamic Keyword Insertion in your Responsive Search Ad, that's going to put your keywords in your headlines. So you'd want to check on that.

Another way that it could appear that something like this is happening could be using a Dynamic ad group where your headlines are being dynamically generated. In that instance, you wouldn't have keywords. So I don't think that's happening.

Just because someone says they did or didn't do something in the account, it doesn't mean they actually did or didn't do something in the account.

It also is possible that if you're running, let's say, Performance Max and Search, and you're seeing these ads in the wild, that they're happening through Performance Max and not actually happening through your Search campaign. Those are the most obvious reasons I can think of as to why this would be happening. 

You're going to want to look at all the active ads that you have. If you're only running Search, then just your Search ads. Shopping or PMax, again, could affect this, and yes, Dynamic Keyword Insertion is all I could think of, otherwise I do not know.

We are six questions in, four more to go in this episode. If you've got a Google Ads question or challenge that needs some personalized attention, you, too, can book a one-on-one call with me.

I promise to be less snarky than I'm being in this episode. And I guarantee I can help you get better results from your Google Ads. Check my availability and book now on my website, at Jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L.ca, or click the link in this episode description.

Back to r/PPC, this question is about budgets. “Google Ad budget limit. My daily budget is fixed at $40, but Google Ads is spending $100 per day. Why is that? How can I fix that? I don't know why they do this, but everything was fine with the budget limit until a week ago.”

So, if your daily budget is $40, and Google is spending $100 (don't know if I believe you), I'll explain why this could be happening.

When you set a daily budget in Google Ads, what Google does is multiply your daily budget by 30.4 and then set that as your monthly budget limit.

It's not unusual to spend more than your daily budget on a given day, it will even out by spending less later.

And the second part of this question hints at that, they said, everything was fine with the budget limit until a week ago. You probably hit a new 30.4 day cycle, which is why it's now spending more again.

And it's probably doing this because your campaign is severely limited by budget. So, the second part of that rule is that Google will not spend more than double your daily budget on a given day.

That means if your budget is $40, Google Ads should not be spending more than $80 a day. 

I have seen it happen before, but it is very rare in the like 10,000 ad accounts I've seen.

So it should not be spending $100 per day. If for some reason it is doing that, it should not be doing that more than like a day or two, tops.

The way to fix it is to leave your budget alone because if you keep changing your budget, which maybe you did during this period - if you just decreased your budget, for example - that then resets that 30.4 day period. 

So, leave the budget alone, set your daily budget according to how much you actually want to spend in a month, and if you find that when that period starts it's really overspending, it's either because it's a new campaign or it's severely limited by budget, which is a different problem you could address. 

Next, is a question from r/adwords. “Daily spend keeps going up with no benefits. Google keeps showing my campaigns are limited by budget and to raise them. After raising them, I don't really see much of a difference. In the beginning, I was targeting a specific city with a $30 a day budget. It has ballooned to $120, and it's still showing my campaign is limited due to budget.

My question is, how do I tell Google that my budget will stay at $30, but try to maximize the performance within the specified budget? From what I see, Google is blowing the budget early and my ads are no longer showing.”

The answer to this person's question is right in their question, it's that word maximize.

If you want to tell Google that your budget is $30 and you want to maximize performance within a specific budget, you should use the Maximize Clicks or Conversions or Conversion Value bid strategy.

Based on what this person is saying, I'm going to guess that they are using Manual Bidding. All they need to do is set a Maximize bid strategy.

Now, $30 a day may just not be enough for what they're trying to do. That's a pretty low budget. And so even if they're just targeting a specific city, if they have like 10 keywords, that's not going to be enough budget. Potentially, depending on what the keywords are. If you have three keywords, that still might not be enough budget.

So, $30 a day is a very, very modest budget. I'm not surprised that you're limited by budget.

If your goal is conversions and your CPA is higher than $30 - by that, I mean, your actual CPA and not just target CPA - you're going to want to raise your budget anyway. Your budget should be at least your cost per conversion, so you can get at least one conversion per day, on average.

But all of that to say, how do I tell Google my budget is $30 and I want you to maximize performance within it? Use a Maximize bid strategy, that's exactly what they're designed for. 

Next is a question from r/PPC. “How to prevent Google from automatically applying recommendations. My campaign is better with max clicks” - if you say so - “but today, it changed to CPA and then a display network was added. How to prevent this? I only see this as a forceful tactic by Google to increase their revenue.”

Gosh, people are angry on anonymous corners of the internet.

Really easy. You just need to turn off Auto Apply Recommendations. You can do that in your account settings. 

The way I usually get there is I click on Recommendations. At the top, there is this little icon with like an arrow going around that says Auto Apply. You click on that and then you can unclick the Auto Apply recommendations.

I agree, adding Display network to Search sucks. Going straight from Max Click to Target CPA is probably also not such a good idea. Is this a forceful tactic by Google to increase their revenue? Maybe or maybe not. I'll reserve judgment on that, but it's really easy to turn it off.

And also buddy, you could Google this and come to the answer rather than complaining on Reddit. 

Anyway, all right, final Reddit question of the day.

Our tenth Reddit question for this episode comes from r/Google Ads. “Google removing Remarketing Ads. I have a coworker who keeps saying that Google is getting rid of Remarketing Display Ads this year because of the third-party cookie removal. Is there any truth to this?” 

So, in terms of official Google announcements, no. Google has not announced that they're getting rid of Remarketing.

Is there any truth to this? Look, cookie-based Remarketing, which a lot of Display Remarketing is, has already gotten less effective than it used to be and will continue to get less effective as cookies are deprecated, as they change.

And so in plain English, your Display Remarketing campaigns have probably already gotten less effective than they used to be, and over time, they'll probably continue to become less effective.

Is Google removing them? There’s no official statement on that, or policy on that, but maybe we'll find out next month at Google Marketing Live. For now, the answer is no, they're not getting rid of that, and if you still want to run Remarketing, first-party data is going to be your best friend.

You can still do Display Remarketing based on first-party data if you want to reach people who are on your customer list or your email list, your past purchasers, who fill out your lead form, someone you have some kind of identifying piece of information for.

Another great way to run Remarketing is what I call In-platform Remarketing. So with Google Ads, that'll be YouTube Remarketing, remarketing to people who have interacted with your YouTube content in some way, because that's on Google's platform. They have that data. That's going to stay unaffected. 

Same if you're running Meta ads, and you want to remarket to people who have had some kind of interaction with your Instagram or Facebook. That is still going to be quite effective, because that's in-platform data that Meta knows. They don't rely on third-party cookies to do that.

Website remarketing has already gotten less effective, from what I've seen, and will continue to do so, but to my knowledge, no, Google is not removing it.

Oh, my brain is tired! But before we go, it is time for the Insider Challenge.

Given the length of this episode already, I won't be posing a new Insider Challenge this week, but I will be sharing how I'd answer last episode's challenge, and then you'll get a new challenge next week.

You can participate by sending me your response from any episode's challenge. The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real-life Google Ads problem solving. 

Shoot me an email to let me know thegooglepro@jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot ca, or send me a voice note in my Instagram DMs. I'm @the_google_pro on Instagram and links to both of those in the episode description as well.

Last episode's challenge was this: Imagine you're auditing a Google Ads account, you're looking at the keywords and you see Quality Scores of, like, 4, 5, 6 - not terrible, but not good. You add the 3 explainer columns to your report, and see that while Landing page experience and Ad relevance are generally average, Expected CTR is below average.

What do you look into next? What, if anything, should the account owner do with that information?

Expected CTR has to do with our own click-through rate, and our competitors' click-through rates. Next, I would look into the search terms report and see how relevant the search terms are to my keywords. Just because our ads are showing on certain search terms, it doesn't mean we have a relevant solution! Based on what I find, I may need to add negatives, adjust my match types, or pause some keywords.

Then, I'd want to review my ads. That's the other part of click-through rate, clicks divided by impressions. For non-brand, I want at least a 5% click-through rate on my ads. Do the ads include the keywords? Do they highlight features, benefits, special offers? Do they have calls to action? This is where Ad Strength alone is not enough; it's the actual content of those assets. I would make sure that it looks enticing and appealing to my target audience.

Here’s something else. I would also check my Auction Insights report to find who I'm competing against, and look up their ads in the Google Ads Library to see why their CTR might be better than mine.

We're not going to copy their ads, but we can definitely use them to inspire us. You can copy down some of their best performing ads - in your opinion, as you don’t see performance metrics in the Google Ads Library - but some of the ones you think are really good. Give those to a Generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Gemini to get new ideas for headlines and descriptions you might be able to use.

If everything looks good and my ads are performing well, then I don't necessarily need to do anything just because Expected CTR is below average. But if in my keyword investigation and ad copy investigation I find areas for improvement, I'll make those changes, give it a month or so, and then see how we're doing.

What would you do? Completely disagree? Let me know by sending me an email or dropping me a voice note.

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.

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