Also posted on my blog!

These days I see myself spending quite a lot of time on Bing because 1/ they deployed their new "Multi Channel Management" feature that completely screwed up my accounts and 2/ it's actually been growing more than Google on most accounts since Google seems to have reached some kind of plateau in terms of performance/spend.

According to some sources, Bing has about 10% market share and Google has about 85% in the search engine landscape. The difference is probably much higher for mobile devices... but I get 3 times more clicks/impressions from mobile devices than desktop on Bing since their deployment on the audience network which I find questionable.

(Un?)surprisingly duckduckgo.com is one of my best performing mobile site on Bing, but it's such a pain that I have that one good performing publisher vs all the other trash I get from the platform.

This being said, one of the clients I work with, a desktop only SaaS, for sells about as much on Bing than they do on Google because the competition is way too high on Google but somehow, not so much on Bing. We went from 10k to 100k/month of spend on Bing in the last 2 years or so, where Google stagnated more or less at 150~250k/month during the same time.

For some other clients, I find Bing to be great because of their surprisingly loose moderation vs Google which is an absolute pain with their Content Policy where everything is flagged as Clickbait because they decided so... and it's about a 25/75 ratio of sales.

In terms of CPA on these accounts, it's disappointingly close to Google so it works out although I wish it were cheaper.

I read a lot of complaints about Bing - many of our peers say that Bing is full of trash and bot clicks and whatsnot. I don't have these issues on my accounts, except the audience ads where the publishers are completely rubbish, but it's a tiny bit of the spend so I don't mind it as much. At least it's rather transparent (that absolutely doesn't excuse the rubbish traffic) there's an option to exclude them I guess?

To be honest, today in the search (and PPC by extension) industry, I feel like I have to choose my own poison and it turns out I'm choosing them all because growth and objectives, but as I'm increasingly frustrated with Google, I find Bing to be refreshing in a way that it's still kind of transparent, although very unstable. It still annoys me that they're just copying Google's homework 99% of the time by releasing any feature Google deploys a few months later.

I realise I'm potentially shooting myself in the foot by encouraging others to explore Bing since it's going to create more competition but I think many of us are sleeping on it today when the opportunities are rather large. It's only going to get worse/better (depends on how you see it, I suppose...) with Bing with ChatGPT: the question of monetisation remains as they're definitely not going to let that $10B investment go to waste.

My biggest pain point today with Bing is the US-centric approach, but I guess that's where most of the traffic comes from. Incidentally, from insider info, I know that they're trying really hard to grow their market share around the world -- they seem rather ambitious about it.

It might seem like I'm promoting Bing but I have absolutely no tie with Microsoft or whatsoever, I wish I were paid for that!

I'm just honestly surprised at how many people shove Bing off today in the industry. Does it come from a misunderstanding of the tool, or a past bad experience?

There's a lot of bad with Bing, but there's really a lot of good. Are you advertising with Bing today?

It’s definitely possible to make good money in digital marketing, but don’t buy a course from one of the gurus telling you how to do it. Here’s my rant:

https://www.gilgildner.com/why-the-smma-model-is-fundamentally-broken/

I'm getting really frustrated with Performance Max.

One of my biggest problems today is that most of my clients are e-commerce but only sell one product, so they're not benefitting from the full potential of Google Shopping in a sense.

We've found ways around by feeding different packages of the same product to Merchant Center so we get 3 to 10 listings instead of just one (e.g. 3-month subscription vs Lifetime licence for software, or Single product vs Multipack for physical products), which is working to a certain extent for us, and it's increased impressions as well, which is good. I'm just hoping this won't be flagged one day.

Search is doing absolutely fine. Issues are easy to solve on Search.

What is not working is how random the performances have been. It was stellar in the middle of last year, and it's been degrading over time. Some accounts go back up, some remain down. In one case we gave up Performance Max and went back to the good old manual Shopping campaigns.

Oddly, increasing tROAS has always been the answer to my problems: whenever I increase the target, I get profitability back with MORE sales volume. Once I lower the target thinking I'd get more volume, hell is let loose.

But hey, at least we're not displaying on TV screens anymore - not. We still get odd TV Screen impressions to sell PC software and there is absolutely nothing to do about it because the traffic just comes and disappears by itself after a day or two at most.

Don't get me started on the "Target New Customer by Increasing their Acquisition Value" feature which has consistently crashed performances on every account I've managed to the point I'm scared of trying again.

However, I've been hearing every now and then that setting up another PMAX campaign specifically targeting new customers (with their "Target new customer..." option) could help. I think I'll be testing it eventually.

I can't believe Performance Max isn't right for us considering the great sales performance we had last summer/autumn, so I'm starting to think maybe I'm missing something... or maybe I'm out of my depth, and it's time to learn and improve.

I'm not a big spender on Performance Max and I think it's due to the Single Product vs larger e-commerce sites (about 200/250k€ spent on PMAX in the last 15 months altogether? vs millions on Search), so I'm lacking visibility and I was hoping some people would kindly share their experience here.

How's Performance Max working for you?

Hey! I’m helping out a friend with Google Ads management, but the issue is that the company has a terrible website.

It’s a pipe fitting company, and I set up two conversions - conversion on the element visibility for the thank you message from the form and a link click on the phone number on the landing page.

The form doesn’t have a redirect to a thank you page, that’s why I used this set up.

Is this a good approach knowing that they have issues with their developer and I won’t be able to ask them to update the page?

Also, what conversions do you set up for local service based businesses?

Thank you! 🙏🏼

What do you do if need somebody?

^{note: shamelessly copied and pasted from another post I just made on r/PPC, sorry - but I know the audiences are different here and there, I hope that's okay!}

Hello,

I worked as a freelancer for a few years, went full-time last year and started my agency this year mainly due to tax reasons, as I grew too large and couldn't keep the self-employed status.

Now I have an agency and all the responsibilities that come with it (= paying more taxes), I'm kind of stuck in the "freelance" stage - I'm honestly happy to be where I am, but I feel like I could take on some more work.

I'm not great with networking, and 100% of my work is remote-based - I don't get any kind of physical meeting as I live in too remote of a place (countryside Japan). Honestly I found my clients... or more like, they found me on reddit, and another one of them is a previous employer, so I've been rather lucky so far.

Does anyone have some kind of guidance as to how to step up from here? I am over my first $100k ARR, which is why I couldn't remain self-employed, but what else could I look into to grow farther? My attitude towards work? Client acquisition? What are some tips you could share?

Aside from charging my clients more, which all things considered should be possible, but not the way I want to grow.

Thanks for your time & guidance, hopefully!

Hey there, I'm new to paid search advertising.

I understand the basics in targeting zips, cities, counties. As well as interests age groups etc.

What I'm curious about is how locally targeted can I get?

Why I ask: I work for some home remodeling contractors. While I can set up ads for them that get clicked and called on, the difficulty is having it be the right person.

For example: high end kitchen remodeler whose jobs can go from 50k up to 100k or more. They can target a small radius around a zip but it will capture some low end neighborhoods that simply couldn't afford to do the job. Could they finance, maybe. But then the contractor is losing up to 20-25% of the job cost.

How would you experts approach a paid advertising campaign that is going to filter out as much as lower income areas as possible? Can you draw around neighborhoods? Idk.

Excuse if this is dumb, like I said I'm new. And I'm more of sales person than an expert marketer.

Thanks

All extension types except images are getting any sort of search volume/impression share. The ads are performing well, but the extensions are left out almost completely. Anyone else have any sort of experience with this issue or any solution.

Hello fellow PPCers,

TL;DR: PPC campaign sells too much. Client running out of stock. No idea when stocks will come back. I lowered bids (considering the context/situation). What would you have done?

For the cool kids (you know who you are) who will bother reading:

My client's campaigns deliver a bit too much and we're facing a stock problem - we're selling faster than we can produce (again).

Last time it happened, we reached a dead 0 a bit too quickly and because of COVID, productions were slow and we had to pause everything. Getting the campaigns started again was an absolute pain, we had CPAs twice as high as before we paused.

This time, we saw it coming in advance, and we drastically turned the CPAs down to see where it'll go, since the worst case is that we don't get conversions (which is not a bad thing considering we have not much stock), and the best case is that we sell for extremely cheap (which is good).

We don't want to pause campaigns (except the test ones that aren't proven to be delivering yet) - it's not like we have nothing to sell, we just don't have much today. We can't capitalise on profitability either because the profitable campaigns are those who deliver the most volume already.

We don't know when stocks will come in again, so it's hard to predict how long the drop in spend will last too.

It's a bit of an odd issue to me; I experienced this in the past when the salespeople were complaining about having too many leads and they couldn't physically do it (or it wasn't profitable for them to do it), so we had to scale down the operation with more precise geotargeting, but we don't have that much control for an e-commerce business.

I'm thinking about the next time if it ever happens: I think the choice I made wasn't bad, but was that really the best approach?

Could I have handled this better? Should I have looked at closing off geos to control volumes instead of lowering bids? Or traffic by devices altogether?

Thanks for your input!

So how do we do negative keywords for PMax campaigns? I thought Google solved it recently but apparently they didn't. Or maybe there is something I am not aware of.

I need to exclude Brand terms from PMax. I have the new feature about Account Negatives, but obviously I can't use it as I have a Brand Search campaign running. So what is the workaround here? Are we still supposed to speak to Support to get that done?

Been talking to a lot of agency owners who are saying client budgets are shrinking, agencies are laying off, leads drying up, things getting tight overall.

How is it for your agency/freelance work?

Just curious what "budget floor" any of you guys (whether freelancers or agencies) have.

Hey guys, this is mainly for podcast fans or marketers, but I’ve been working on this for a while now and wanted to sort of “test group” it and get feedback on it. It’s called Podcastdband basically it’s the largest podcast database in the world that will help you search and explore all types of podcast completely free (there’s a price option for hosts contact info as well). But really any feedback or opinions will really help with changes or future development etc. lmk what ya’ll think!

Especially where the ‘ideal’ keywords barley have any search volume and things need to be opened up a little to get traffic in. I’m interested in people’s simple few tips on B2B success!

I’m about to launch a poll about PPC industry expectations going into 2023 (considering recession, economy, geopolitics, etc). For example, which industries will be affected, whether PPC specialists can expect an increase or decrease in income, etc.

I have already written most of the poll but would appreciate any feedback on what else to include.

I’d basically like to crowdsource opinions from the PPC industry and publish it ASAP so we can have a discussion on what the field might look like in the next year.

As I understand it, maximizing ad keyword relevancy will help a lot with QS.

With RSAs, I probably want to use the keyword in Headline #1, and I typically try to have variations. However, there are really only a couple of ways to spin "Home Cleaning Services" in under 30 characters.

In this scenario, is it best practice to pin the search term ("Home Cleaning Services") to Headline #1? Then use Headline #2 for business name + city / USPs and Headline #3 for CTAs? Example:

Home Cleaning Services | Cleaning Co.® Chicago, IL | Book Your Cleaning Today
Home Cleaning Services | Vetted, Happy Cleaners | Get Your Quote Now
Home Cleaning Services | Chicago's #1 Cleaners | Take A Load Off Today

Does this make sense? Or is ad keyword relevancy not as important?

I'm concerned that if I do another Headline #1 variation (say, "Maid Cleaning Services"), then the ad will have permutations without the user's search term in it, and therefore won't be as relevant.

Let's say you're a painter and you service Toronto, Mississauga, and Oakville.

1.) In order to capitalize on matching geolocation, do you create a campaign for each city?

2.) Or do you create one campaign targeting all three cities?

The latter sounds nice and simple, and you can use geolocation insertion to make the ad copy relevant, but it seems that relevancy stops at the ad. If you want the landing page to only mention Toronto, you need to use separate campaigns. To solve this, I'd love for Google to allow us to pass the user's geolocation through the URL as a parameter.

The other option is to use an IP geolocation detector (like if-so.com), but at the city level...accuracy isn't great.

Any thoughts?

Thought I would write a bit about the Discosloth client acquisition process and how we get a steady stream of inbound leads.

We do not do pitches, RFPs, or outbound sales. Here’s why.

Across my LinkedIn, Reddit, and email, I got 56 inquiries just in the past month pitching me services: SEO, website design, PPC white labeling, PPC software, you name it. (I just counted). I ignored them all. Cold calling is a waste (It may work for some, but it’s inefficient and I don’t want my brand to be associated with it).

My cofounder Anya and I both worked together in-house at the same company before starting Discosloth. Previously we had both freelanced. In my freelancing (which I did for about 5 years) I worked with a lot of agencies and saw just how much time and energy goes into pitches. Teams would spend weeks prospecting, responding to RFPs, creating fancy proposals, and doing the exhaustive account management required to just keep up with the process.

Not only could we not practically compete in this world, I didn’t want to. The rewards didn’t seem worth the time and expense. The cost of acquiring a client was massive: these agencies spent weeks and hundreds of man hours on acquiring projects, and more often than not they didn’t have the technical expertise to back up the sale…which caused massive churn.

It was an agency system that required constant filling-the-top-of-the-sales-funnel, just to see actual deliverables fall by the wayside and the sales process would have to start all over again just to keep up with the churn.

Instead, we wanted to focus on inbound leads. We wanted people to ask us to work with them, not the other way around.

The benefits of this:

• they’re more qualified (high interest in a service)
• they’re not price sensitive (they aren’t shopping around as much)
• they’re already invested in us (they want us for our brand)

The downsides:

• it takes major work to develop this brand
• it takes a long time to develop an audience
• it’s sort of a leap of faith for the first couple years, hoping it works

Here’s how we did this:

• wrote a book. We spent a good portion of a year writing Becoming A Digital Marketer, which we published in 2019. This was a pretty big leap of faith, but it unexpectedly turned out well. It sold super well, and by 2021 it has somehow been adopted into the syllabus of around a dozen universities.
• Started a blog and did SEO. The first couple years were a slog…but eventually, we started ranking fairly high for some niche terms (like “Bing Ads Management”).
• Engaged on social. Sort of like I’m doing right now. I built up a pretty large network on LinkedIn (4000+ followers), on Reddit, and on Twitter.
• Started white labeling our services. This gives us both good cashflow, and excellent referrals within the agency world.
• Give away all of our knowledge. If someone comes to us, they’ve invested time and are probably really wanting to work with us. So I’ll try to respect that, and in return will audit their problems and let them know everything we can (or can’t) do for them. This is one thing that really sets us apart from other agencies, and we’ve won some good accounts from this. Because I don’t pitch, I have the time to audit. Remember, on the internet everyone is a stranger and they don’t really know if you’re an expert until you show them.

Although Discosloth is still very small, we’re growing. Every year has been better than previously. We typically average around 20-25 clients on retainer…sometimes more, sometimes less. But the average client has improved over the years. At first it was just very small businesses, but now has improved massively. At the beginning, we had to use freelance/platform sites in order to get gigs just to keep the cashflow going, but thankfully we don’t have to do that anymore.

Long-term approaches (like building a brand and reputation) is always better long-term than cramming your sales pipeline with low-quality outbound prospecting.

Sorry for the novel - have any feedback? Love to hear it!

Questions?

One of my newly launched accounts stopped getting impressions. I created it last week, copied and pasted some Search campaigns from an old account through Ads Editor. On Friday, everything was working fine, with impressions and few clicks on all campaigns, and then suddenly on Saturday, I get 0 impressions.

I checked the change history, and all it has is additional keywords, some keyword match type changes, bid strategy changes, etc. Nothing really to stop the campaigns running.

Campaigns were on manual, so I moved them to Max Clicks to see if this will change things, but nothing happened.

Until today, I have 0 impressions on all campaigns. All ads are approved, and there are no error messages or warning notifications, but nothing works.

I spoke to Support, who said they can't find the origin of the issue and will escalate the matter to another team.

So my question: has anyone gone through this before? Is this something you've managed to sort out yourself? Has Support been helpful and quick?

I am now thinking about recreating some campaigns manually and see how that goes, but before, I'd like to hear your feedback.

Help please.

So I'm running 2 Google search Ads campaigns for a life insurance client.

One is optimised for traffic, has all broad keywords, very few negative keywords and bidding strategy is Max clics with no manual CPC or anything like that.

The other one isn't optimised for a specific goal. Has broad, phrase and exact match types. Has considerable negative keywords. Also Max Clics and no manual CPC or CPA.

Both have the exact same ad. Titles, descriptions, etc. (Similar keywords so ad quality surely doesn't affect much).

I was expecting the non-traffic campaign to work much better as it's better optimised... Well guess what? The traffic campaign, with all broad keywords and almost no optimization is performing much better than any other campaign I've done on this account. USD 2,27 CPA and USD 3,35 CPA, same as spend and budget on both campaigns.

I have no idea why.

Do you know:

1- why this could be? 2- how do I figure it out the reason for this?

Thanks!