On this week’s episode of Marketing in 10, we’re talking all about Black Friday, Cyber week and how to run ads to your promotions.

Hey, friends. I’m Jim Lastinger. Welcome to Marketing in 10. This is the podcast where I cover a different marketing topic each week and I do it in 10 minutes or less. Today, I’m talking all of about Black Friday and Cyber Week and how the best strategies for running paid ads to promote your business and [inaudible 00:00:47] of your promotions during the holidays. Black Friday and Cyber Week are some of the most important times of the year for advertisers, particularly if you’re an e-commerce company. But something I see all the time is that advertisers don’t really know how to take advantage of Black Friday, and they don’t have a strategy for running ads to take advantage of their promotions. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. This is my recommendation and this is my strategy for how I approach holiday seasons and this is what I recommend you do in your campaigns.

The very first step in any successful promotion is always the planning phase. You want to make sure you have your promo dates nailed down and schedule the ads and extensions accordingly. Once the promo is over, make sure you go back to your normal ads. You’ll never believe how many times I’ve seen customers just run Black Friday ads all the way until January. It happens all the time. It’s always super helpful to have all of your ads and promotions ready to go at least a week beforehand. You don’t want to start planning your promos or writing new ad copy on Black Friday. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Okay, so first let’s talk about the Google ad side. Your approach here is going to depend a bit on what kind of promotions you’re running. If you’re running something store wide, a promotion that applies to all of your products or services, then you’ll want to add promotion extensions with all of the details. I recommend adding the promo extensions at the account level just to keep it simple. These promo extensions, they show up nicely on your text ads and clearly explain your promos. The extra real estate really helps your ads to pop. If it makes sense, I recommend creating new versions of your text ads themselves that include the promo text. Maybe replace one of your headlines or descriptions with details of your promo.

If you’re only discounting one or more products, then update the text ads that you use for those products. A more limited approach there might be the best way to go. You can also upload promotions in Google Merchant Center and have those show up in your shopping ads. That’s also something you should do, definitely if you’re eCommerce.

Okay, so next, let’s talk about what to do on the Facebook ads side. For Facebook, you want to make sure that you have your new ads ready to go that heavily emphasize your promotion. You’ll want to create new ads specifically for your promos. Display the promotion prominently in your headline, in your call to action. You want to call it out in your text, maybe even put it in your images or videos, just depending on what you have. If you have warm traffic or remarketing campaigns, you’ll definitely want to create new ads for your promos there. You want to take those people that already have some knowledge of your brand and tell them, “Okay, we’re doing something a little bit special right now.” Give them all the more incentive to go ahead and jump into purchasing.

Something you might want to do is I suggest increasing your ad budget for your remarketing campaigns just to make sure that that promo is shown to people that are already interested. Take advantage of it as much as you can. The bottom line is that you want to use all of these options that you have for showing your promotions. It’s super busy out there this time of year, and you might have to increase your ad budgets just a little bit just to keep the same level of visibility that you typically get. Since it’s busy, you need to make your ad stand out as much as possible so use all the different options that we’ve talked about here. New ad copy, ad extensions, promo extensions, all of that stuff. It’s all going to be important.

I’ll have show notes in a transcript available at jimlastinger.com/38. Feel free to reach out there if you have any questions about digital marketing or any of your holiday promotions. I’ll be glad to help. If you have two minutes, please rate and review the podcast. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to do that. That really helps me to grow this thing and to help more people.

I have a bonus for all of you listeners. I’ve created a free guide that shows you exactly how to manage your Google ads accounts in just 30 minutes a week. This is a great guide. It’s exactly the process that I teach to my coaching clients. It includes everything you need to run a profitable ad account. You can download it for free at jimlastinger.com/guide. That’s jimlastinger.com/guide. I’ll also drop a link to this in the show notes.

That’s all for this week’s episode of Marketing in 10. I’ll be back next week with another episode. Until then, take care. Have a great day. Thanks.

The post Ep 38: Black Friday/ Cyber Week Ads Prep appeared first on Jim Lastinger.

Today on Marketing In 10, I’m going to cover a recent Google Ads beta feature that’s been rolled out pretty widely so far and very quietly that can negatively impact your campaigns.

Hey everybody. This is Jim. Welcome to Marketing In 10. This week I want to spend a few minutes talking about Google’s auto apply recommendations feature, which has so far been listed as a beta feature. If you haven’t seen this in your account, then you’re definitely not alone. It’s something that is active for many accounts, but it’s kind of hidden, even though that it’s there and you might not know that you need to take a look at it. So this feature, and if you could see me right now, you’d know that I’m using air quotes around feature is something that evolved from the Google recommendations tab. And I’ve talked about the Google recommendations tab back in episode 32. So you might want to go back and give that a listen when you’re done here. So Google’s algorithms make all of the recommendations that show up in the recommendations tab inside Google ads.

Now the next logical step for Google is to start automatically applying some of those recommendations for you if you don’t do it yourself. And that’s what we’re talking about here with this new feature. Okay, so here’s a step by step guide to finding this feature so you can take a look at what we’re talking about. In Google ads, if you click on the all campaigns on the left side of the screen, and then click on recommendations, you’ll see a small button on the top right of the screen that says auto apply. So click that and you’ll see a list of all the settings that Google can automatically apply for you. I have recorded a short YouTube video showing you exactly how to find these settings, and I’ll include a link to that in the show notes as well. So there are a lot of things here that you don’t necessarily want Google setting for you.

You don’t want Google adding keywords to your account, especially broad match keywords for example. But the settings that really scare me though are the ones that allow Google to adjust your row as targets or your CPA targets. Google doesn’t know what these need to be, so there’s no way that I’d give them control over those options. And here’s a good example from one of the accounts that I manage. So this particular account sells event tickets and the average transaction for the business across all the different marketing channels was $75. We initially set a target CPA of $50 to make sure that we would see a profit on any sales coming through Google ads. At least that was the plan. One week we noticed the average CPA nearly doubled. And after looking through the account, I was able to find where the auto apply recommendations feature had changed the CPA from $50 to $85, which is almost always going to be losing money for the client, so that’s a great example of why you have to be really careful here and not let Google automatically change those things.

Personally, I recommend turning off all of these settings, but if you feel like there’s a couple of those that aren’t quite as harmful and you want to leave those active, that’s fine with me. Just be careful.

And I’ll have a show notes and a transcript available for this at jimlastinger.com/37. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. I’ll be glad to help. As a thank you for being a listener,

I’ve created a free guide that shows you exactly how to effectively manage your Google ads in just 30 minutes a week. So this is the process I teach all of my coaching clients. It’s very detailed and gives you exactly what you need to know to be able to run profitable ad accounts with the least amount of management time possible. So you can download it for free at jimlastinger.com/guide. That’s jimlastinger.com/guide. And I’ll drop a link to this in the show notes at jimlastinger.com/37.

And that’s it for this week’s episode, I’ll be back next week with another episode of Marketing In 10. Until then, take care. Have a great day.

The post Ep 37: Google’s Auto-Apply Recommendations Beta appeared first on Jim Lastinger.

Today on Marketing in 10, we’re talking about Google’s recent announcement that text ads as we know them are going away next year.

Hey everybody, this is Jim Lastinger. Welcome to another episode of Marketing in 10. Today, we’re going to be talking about ads. Specifically, we’re going to be talking about text ads and how Google’s recently made some big news. They recently announced that they will be ending the current expanded text ad format in 2022. So, this is part of Google’s overall push towards more automation.

So specifically what’s happening is that starting on June 30th, 2022, you won’t be able to add or create any new expanded text ads, you’ll only be able to create responsive search ads. You’ll still be able to run the expanded text ads after that date, you just won’t be able to create any new ads or edit the existing ones. You’ll also be able to pause and restart your already existing expanded text ads. So they’re not going away completely, you just won’t be able to create new ones or edit the old ones.

What do you need to do to prepare for this change? So, the first thing you need to do is make sure that ad testing and ad copy writing are a priority for the next six months. If you haven’t been putting the time into creating new ads, then that’s definitely something you want to prioritize right now.

I’ll put a link in the show notes to the ad testing process that I recommend everybody follow, but ultimately you’re going to want to have a bunch of expanded text ads created in all of your different ad groups. That way you can turn them off and on in the future as you need to. This is important, because the old ad formats can sometimes work really well. So, I manage several different ad accounts that still have some of the very oldest text ad formats from 10 years ago that convert better than their modern counterparts.

So you never know exactly what is going to resonate best with your customer, so it’s important to test as much as possible. Then you want to have those options available to you as much as possible. So, it’s important to go ahead and get all of those different ads created and in your account now.

I’ll have show notes and a transcript available at jimlastinger.com/36. So, that’s jimlastinger.com/36. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about Google Ads, Facebook Ads, SEO, or any other digital marketing topics.

Also, I have a bonus for my listeners. I’ve created a free guide that shows you exactly how to manage your Google Ads accounts in just 30 minutes a week. This is the exact process that I teach my coaching clients and includes everything you need to run a profitable ad account. You can download it for free at jimlastinger.com/guide.

That’s all for this week’s episode, I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing in 10. Until then, take care, have a great day. See you.

The post Ep 36: Google Removing ETAs in 2022 appeared first on Jim Lastinger.

Today on Marketing In 10, we’re talking Google ads best practices. I’ll walk you through the different types of ad extensions that are available to you and explain why they’re crucial to your accounts success.

Hey everybody, it’s Jim Lastinger. Welcome to another Marketing In 10. Today, we’re talking all about ad extensions in Google ads. It’s definitely not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s one of those things that can kind of take your account from newbie level up to high-performing.

So ad extensions aren’t anything new. They’ve been around forever, but it’s always amazing to me to see how many accounts aren’t using them or aren’t using them as much as they can be.

There are several different types of ad extensions available, but the most common ones that I see are site links and call-outs. Site links allow you to show a list of important links that you want to show the searcher that goes alongside your regular ad copy. You can kind of think of these as additional landing pages that would be relevant to people searching.

Call-outs are simpler. They’re just short blurbs that you can use to entice clicks. So typically these are short little text blurbs, things like free shipping, hundreds of styles, those kind of things.

And those two types of ad extensions, site links and call-outs are pretty universal. Every account needs to be using those, but there are other ad extensions that certain types of businesses might want to use, like promo extensions, price extensions if you have prices on major products that you want to put forward, and there are some other ones too, that are very industry specific.

So at a high level, why are ad extensions so important? Well, there’s two reasons. First, ad extensions make your ads more prominent. Google doesn’t always display every ad extension that you have on your account, but they usually will show at least one, and that kind of depends on whether your ad is showing in the first position, second position, third position. Different positions on different searches are going to show different ad extensions.

But in general, the more ad extensions that you show, the more real estate that your ad is going to take up, which leads to the second reason that you need to use ad extensions. More prominent ads are going to get clicked more often. That means more clicks for you, a higher click through rate and higher click through rates can help your quality score, which theoretically can lead to lower cost per click. All those benefits that we’ve talked about many times before.

So if you don’t have ad extensions on all of your ads, then you need to start working on that today. You can set extensions at the account level. That’s what I would do first, but if you have vastly different campaigns or ad groups, you can set specific ad extensions at those levels as well when it makes sense.

And I’ll have show notes and a transcript available at jimlastinger.com/35. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions at all about ad extensions or Google ads at all.

That’s it for this week’s episode. I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing In 10. Until then, have a great day. Take care.

The post Ep 35: All About Google Extensions appeared first on Jim Lastinger.

Today on Marketing in 10, I’m talking about the fallout from the Facebook ads and iOS 14 privacy changes. I’ll go through what I’ve seen in my accounts.

Hey everybody, Jim Lastinger here. Welcome to Marketing in 10. Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about Facebook ads. So Apple kind of made huge waves in the ad industry when they announced iOS 14, about a year ago. And iOS 14 required more transparency around apps that track user activity. And I believe this actually kind of took place with iOS 14.5. So not the original iOS 14 update, but this kind of recently took effect back around January, February I believe. So due to this update Facebook, for example, would have to get explicit permission from users to track their activity. And naturally, most iOS users are going to opt out of that tracking. So that’s going to cause a big problem for Facebook ads, but how has this worked out in reality? What is the real world data show? In reality, the change hasn’t been nearly as monumental as Facebook was warning.

Whenever you would log into the Facebook ads manager, you would just be bombarded with warnings, and alerts, and tasks that you would need to complete related to the iOS changes. So from what I’ve seen, the changes haven’t been that drastic. There have definitely been some changes in cost and return on ad spend, but so far, nothing that even something like seasonality couldn’t explain. So in larger accounts I’ve seen return on ad spend dropped slightly like maybe 10% or something like that, but that’s a small enough number that other factors like COVID, traditional summer e-com slowdowns that we see in some industries, those types of things could easily just as much have that effect. So, so far what I’ve seen is accounts that have a good amount of historical data, accounts that have strong audiences that are defined, a good number of quality lookalike audiences that have been in place for awhile.

You really shouldn’t notice any downturns from these changes because they’re not as dependent on brand new users coming into the funnel. On the other hand, the accounts that might be struggling a little bit more are the newer accounts that don’t have as much data, they don’t have the large number of audiences and the audiences don’t have as many members. Those accounts are going to be the ones that are probably the most effected here. Overall, this definitely hasn’t been a killer for Facebook ads, but it may differ on a case by case basis. I can see that for sure.

If you have any questions about your Facebook ads strategy, then feel free to reach out to me and we’ll talk through it. You can reach me at Jim@deepfieldinc.com. And as always, I’ll have a transcript for this episode up at jimlastinger.com/34.

That’s it for this episode. I’ll be back next week with another episode of Marketing in 10. Until then, take care guys. Have a great day.

The post Ep 34: Fallout from iOS 14 and Facebook Ads appeared first on Jim Lastinger.

Today on Marketing In 10, we’re talking SEO. Google’s latest, big algorithm shift started rolling out in June. That’s the page experience and Core Web Vitals update. So we’ll talk about the impact on the SEO world right after this.

Hey, everybody. Jim Lastinger here. Welcome to another episode of Marketing In 10. Today, we’re talking a little bit of SEO. And if you’ve been in the SEO world, then you’ve undoubtedly been bombarded with info about the Core Web Vitals update and how they’re going to impact the SEO world and mark a big shift in how we approach SEO going forward. That’s something that I definitely believe has been overstated quite a bit, but that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And I’ll tell you a little bit about what I’ve seen so far in my clients’ sites.

So first, I’ll give you a kind of brief overview of what Core Web Vitals is. This is Google’s plan to focus on page speeds as a major ranking factor. For the last however many years, page speed has been a ranking factor, but now Google is apparently going to give us a little bit more insight into that as to what specifics, aspects of page speed are going to impact your ranking, such as Largest Contentful Paint, what things we need to be focusing on, being a little bit more specific than page speed in general.

So Google has lots of tools available for this. I suggest you take a look at your own site’s performance and see if there’s some quick wins you can implement. And I’ll put links for some of these things in the show notes, which will be up at jimlastinger.com/33. This rollout was originally supposed to happen back in May 2021, but it was delayed a little bit. It actually started rolling out mid-June and should be finished by the end of August. I’m recording this at the end of June. So we’ve got a little bit of that time period has passed. So there’s definitely still probably more to come by the end of August.

So what have I actually seen as a result of this Core Web Vitals update so far? Honestly, I haven’t seen anything change yet. If you’ve worked with a lot of real-world sites like I have, then you realize it’s actually pretty difficult to get good grades on the PageSpeed tools that Google is recommending. To get passing scores, you’re going to have to do some heavy work with a developer. My thinking is that 90% of sites so far haven’t really done anything to improve their page speeds specific to Core Web Vitals. So that means 90% of rankings should probably stay pretty close to where they are now. For the remaining 10% of sites that actually have done some work, is it possible that they’re going to improve their scores and get some sort of ranking benefit? Absolutely, it’s possible, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that. And like I said, we’re still early into this process. So I’ll update you if I see something that’s contrary to that.

Interesting, really, a recent search metrics study estimated that less than 4% of websites passed all of their Core Web Vitals tests. So if you haven’t worked on this very much, then you’re in good company. Nobody else has either. I’ll put a link to the study in the show notes at jimlastinger.com/33. And Google itself is even now saying that page experience is just one of the many ranking factors and won’t drastically alter search results. That’s a far cry from the doom and gloom in the SEO industry when this stuff was first announced about a year ago.

So don’t get me wrong. I recommend everybody put in the work to make sure their sites load as quickly as possible because that’s definitely tied to improved user experience, better bounce rates, higher conversion rates, all that stuff. I just wouldn’t go through the effort for SEO’s sake. For the majority of sites, I still think it’s better to focus your efforts on improving your content or creating new content.

If you’ve seen any impact from this update, then let me know. I’d love to hear about it. You can leave a comment at jimlastinger.com/33 or email me. My email address is jim@deepfieldinc.com. And that’s all for this week’s episode. I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing In 10. Until then, have a great day.

The post Ep 33: Core Web Vitals Update appeared first on Jim Lastinger.

If you manage any Google Ads accounts, then you’ve most likely seen something called an optimization score. On today’s episode of Marketing In 10, I’m going to tell you what that optimization score is and whether or not you should factor it into your management processes.

Hey everybody, Jim Lastinger here. Welcome to another episode of Marketing In 10. It’s early summer here, it’s late June when I’m recording this. So it’s good to have another batch of Marketing In 10 episodes coming out.

So we’ll jump right into optimization scores. So how many of you have the Google Ads app on your phone? If you do then you’re probably like me and you’re bombarded just about every single day with constant notification saying that your optimization score has dropped by 7% or something like that. So these notifications, they make them sound kind of serious. So you’re probably wondering what this optimization score is? Right off the bat, I’ll tell you that optimization scores aren’t critical, at least not at this point. They’re really just a measure of how many Google Ads recommendations of Google’s own recommendations that you’re following inside the Ad account. And as we’ve talked about on a previous episode, around Google account reps, Google’s recommendations aren’t everything they’re cracked up to be.

So most of the time, they’re not something that you need to be concerned with and they’re probably not always going to be in your favor if you do make changes. So I recommend going back and listening to the episode about an ad account reps. That was episode 31 and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. To get a good optimization score, you have to go to the recommendations tab in Google Ads. And then when you’re there, you need to either implement or dismiss the tasks that they recommend for you. Some of the things there aren’t going to make any sense, like adding a bunch of broad match keywords to your ad groups, that doesn’t make any sense at all usually. But some things they might catch that actually do make sense, like you’ve got a negative keyword that’s blocking one of your keywords or something like that. Or sometimes it’s duplicate keywords and multiple campaigns so those can be valuable.

But the bottom line, if you do have free time and who really does, and you want to devote a bit of that to your optimization score, then feel free to dive in and take a look at the recommendations tab. But if you’re like me and you felt like your processes, processes you already have in place, are pretty strong and cover everything, then I typically would just ignore those recommendations and also ignore optimization scores. As always I’ll have a transcript of this episode up, that’ll be at jimlastinger.com/32. And that’s it for this week’s episode. I’ll be back soon with more Marketing In 10. Until then, take care, have a great day.

The post Ep 32: Google Ads Optimization Scores appeared first on Jim Lastinger.

If you have an ad account with either Google or Facebook, then you’ve most likely received calls or emails from your account reps. Today, we’re going to talk about how to best utilize those account representatives.

Hey, everybody. Jim Lastinger here. Hope everything’s going well for you. Today, we’re going to talk about account reps. If you’re listening to this podcast then you probably have at least some experience dealing with account reps. Either you’ve actively worked with one at some point in the past, or maybe you’ve been approached by one and sometimes repeatedly to an annoying degree. Today, I’m going to give you my thoughts on ad account reps, how to use them, when to ignore them and so on.

First, let’s talk about the biggest issue with account reps. The quality of the reps that you get for your account, it really just depends on how much money you’re spending. If you’re a small account, then you’re likely going to get a contractor from an outside company that Google is contracting and they’re going to be your account rep. Their job is essentially to get you to increase your spend.

If you’re spending a larger amount of money, say something at least 20 or $30,000 a month, then you might actually get a team at Google who can provide some real value and some real insight. If you are one of these low spending accounts, like the vast majority of people are, then I recommend pretty much ignoring the account rep unless you actually have a problem that you need some help with.

The suggestions they’re going to give you are mostly meant to increase your ad spend. They’re going to get you to try out new account features, increase the level of automation in your account, and if you’re not in a profitable account already, then these tests are probably just going to eat up more of your budget. If you do actually have an issue with something not getting approved, not getting delivered correctly, then feel free to reach out to your account reps. They can sometimes help expedite these processes.

If you have a larger account, then you’re probably already working with an account rep to some degree. There are some really good account reps out there. They can help you with big picture items like strategy, researching trends, volumes and a lot more than that. They also have access to a lot more data and features than you have and can provide that to you sometimes. If there’s a particular beta feature that you’re interested in trying for your account, account reps can sometimes get you into those. They can definitely help get you further up the list.

The key idea here though is the same underlying theme still applies even with the better account reps. They want you to spend more money. The difference is that they’re going to be more willing to listen to your concerns and probably work with you to address those concerns and figure out what’s going to actually make sense for your account.

Once you get to these larger monthly spends, you’re probably going to have some budget to experiment with anyway so feel free to use some of that to test out some of their suggestions. Another important thing to keep in mind about account reps is that they cycle out pretty frequently. For most accounts, you’re going to get a different account rep every quarter, so that doesn’t give you a whole lot of time to work with a particular rep and get acquainted with them. Be sure to keep that in mind. You’re going to be constantly cycling through account reps.

There seems to be a little bit more consistency when you get to the higher level rep. They tend to stick around with your accounts a little bit longer, which is a positive thing. But overall, that’s my approach for utilizing account reps. I would say ignore them until you get to the point where you can use their help and then lean on them as much as necessary, but you’ll always want to be wary about giving them too much control of what you’re doing. That’s all for this week’s episode. I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing Intent. Until then, take care. Have a great day, guys.

The post Ep 31: How to Work Successfully with Ad Account Reps appeared first on Jim Lastinger.

Any ad account that’s looking to scale up ad spend needs to have a plan for remarketing to previous customers and visitors. Today I’m covering how I build remarketing audiences and the audiences that I recommend everyone have in their accounts.

Hey everybody. Jim Lastinger here. Hope everything’s going well for you.

Today we’re talking about remarketing audiences, what they are, how to build them and how I use them. First of all, what is a remarketing audience? It’s a pretty simple concept. A remarketing audience, that’s also called retargeting depending on which platform you’re in, a remarketing audience is a group of people that’s usually collected through Google Analytics that you want to be able to advertise to. So a pretty simple concept. It probably makes sense to talk about the types of audiences I recommend that you use as the next step here.

First, every good remarketing campaign needs to consider previous website visitors. The idea is that anybody that’s been to your site is more likely than not going to be a targeted new someone that you should target ads to in the future. I recommend making lists of visitors from the last two days, the last seven days, last 30 days, last 90 days. Those are for starters. You can add other time periods as you collect data and see what makes sense for your particular site. The reason I say create audiences for the last two days and last seven days is typically people that have been to your site very recently they’re kind of hotter prospects, so to speak. So you’ll want to be able to aggressively advertise to those folks.

Next you might want to make an audience of people that took a specific action on your site. For example, if you’re an e-commerce company, you might want to have an audience of people that viewed a particular product or a particular product category, or maybe even added a product to cart. This is a pretty common practice. You’ll see that on just about all e-commerce campaigns. If you’re a different type of company, maybe you have a page that makes sense that you want to track such as, create an appointments page or a directions page, you want to be able to target people that have visited those pages or even taken actions on those pages.

These are pretty basic audiences, but you can get as refined as you want. Maybe you want to create an audience of people who added products to cart, but didn’t check out. That’s definitely doable and something that a lot of advertisers do. Maybe you want to create an audience of people who visited your site from Facebook or from an organic search. Maybe you only want to target people who have visited at least five pages on your site. All of these things are definitely possible.

The only real limit that you have is the size of your audience. You can’t use an audience in a campaign until it has at least a thousand members. So keep that in mind. If you want to get really specific and create an audience with only two people in it, so if you’re going to have a lot of different variables and get that specific, it’s not going to benefit you because an audience that only has two people is never going to display.

Okay. Next, how do you actually create these remarketing audiences? Most of this is done directly in Google Analytics. That’s the way I prefer to do it. You’ll go to the admin tab and look for the audience definitions link. That’s where you’ll be able to create audiences however you see fit. There’s a handy built-in tool that’ll tell you how many people would have been in that audience in the last seven days, so that you can check your logic and make sure that you’re kind of getting what you’re expecting to get when you create that audience.

There’s also a handy tool where you can import audiences from a gallery. These are publicly available options, templates, so to speak. I recommend doing it this way if you’re just trying out audiences for the first time, that way you can make sure that you’re getting things set up correctly. You can always build out your own version of these audiences alongside the important ones and see if you’re getting the same numbers.

That’s it. That’s all for this week’s episode. I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing and 10. Until then, take care and have a great day.

The post Ep 30: Remarketing Audiences for Google Ads appeared first on Jim Lastinger.

Google ads just dropped a new bombshell about match types that’s sure to have advertisers up in arms. Let’s talk about it.

Hey everybody, Jim Lastinger here. Welcome to Marketing In 10. So Google drops some news over the last few days, so we’re going to discuss that today. If you have a Google ads account and you undoubtedly got an email a few days ago, talking about the upcoming changes to keyword match types.

So Google announced that they are beginning the process of removing my favorite match type, the broad match modified type. Okay. So here’s exactly what’s changing. So starting on February 18th, phrase match and broad match modified will begin to match the same queries. So the queries that get matched to your keywords will start changing as soon as February 18. So that’s the first date that you’ll want to pay attention to. And overall, this transition is expected to be completed in July, at least that’s what they’re saying now. So at that point, you won’t be able to create any more broad match modified keywords.

It is important to note that Google saying that any preexisting broad match modified keywords, anything that you have now, will still be allowed. They’ll just match using the new behavior starting on February 18th. The behavior word phrase match and broad match modifiable will start delivering the same results.

Okay. So who is this change going to affect? It’s going to affect pretty much anyone that uses broad match modified keywords, of course, but I don’t think that’s going to end up being a huge shift primarily because Google has been tinkering with match types continuously over the last few years, and this is just the latest evolution.

So what do you need to do? First, take a look through your account and see how many places you’re using broad match modified. If you’re a heavy user of broad match modified, like I usually am, make sure that you create phrase match versions of those keywords. I would leave them in the same ad group neoplasm or something like that for now, but just make sure you have those created. And whatever you do, don’t remove your preexisting broad match modified keywords. You will want to keep those around for the future, just so that if you decide to use them at some point, you’ll be able to have that option because you won’t be able to create them after July.

If you don’t use broad match modified extensively, then I would, for your highest volume keywords, I would recommend adding a broad match modified version of those keywords, just to keep your options open because after July, you won’t be able to do that. You don’t have to use them or keep them active, but having them in the account it’s a good idea, just to be on safe side.

You’ll want to be extra vigilant about checking your search terms reports and adding new negative keywords. That that goes for any time, but it’s especially important whenever Google makes a change to the match types. And it’s especially important here because the keywords should get more broad as these types of changes come into play. So you’ll be matching for more than you were before.

If you have any questions about the change, then feel free to reach out to me and I’ll do the best that I can to help. But that’s all for this week’s episode, and I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing In 10. Until then, take care and have a great day.

The post Ep 29: Google Ads Removes Broad Match Modified Keywords appeared first on Jim Lastinger.