PPCChat | PPC Holiday Wish List | 12th December 2023

We all like to wish for something good during the holiday season. Like every year, host Julie F Bacchini discussed the PPC Holiday Wish List with experts to know their wish list for PPC platforms, the PPC industry and PPC clients or stakeholders.

Q1: What is on your holiday wish list for PPC platforms?

I mean, search terms. Exact match starting to you know, match things exactly. I’d love more accurate audience numbers on Meta. I’d like more transparency in ad disapprovals from the policy team too. @JuliaVyse

MORE TRANSPARENCY. Of course we’re headed in the opposite direction, but a girl can dream. @beyondthepaid

For Google Ads…

1. make exact match exact again
2. let me see all the queries
3. some actual suggestions for accounts with low conversion volumes to use automated bidding
4. remembering that B2B exists @NeptuneMoon

I wish Google would work for the benefit of their advertisers and users. @Pete_Bowen

All of this and then also maybe not manipulating the auction for the sole purpose of meeting revenue goals. @alexnicoll93

Better support from Google! I wish they would go back to agency-level reps who help us grow our businesses and support our book of business. @revaminkoff

Agree with @alexnicoll93 – less cushion shaking would be nice. @beyondthepaid

Support in general from all the platforms @revaminkoff It is absolutely wild to me that they provide so little actual support to paying customers. @NeptuneMoon

100% @NeptuneMoon – It’s so frustrating to feel like you need support / have legitimate questions or have found bugs and not be able to get it. @revaminkoff

Getting better support from your cable provider than you do from an ad platform is really something. @NeptuneMoon

If I could just see all of my search queries again, I would be so happy. @kytaylor88

Ooohhh! One more for Google Ads…STOP MATCHING COMPETITORS TO OTHER BRANDSIf we want to run competitor campaigns that is a strategic decision! @NeptuneMoon

I don’t even necessarily need exact match to be exact. I would just like it if close variants were actually close variants. @alexnicoll93

Oh how our standards have lowered @alexnicoll93 eh @NeptuneMoon

How about no more using AI and ML interchangeably And not calling every automated thing AI. @NeptuneMoon

@alexnicoll93 100%. I’m fine with matching to misspellings (most of the time). But I’m sick of bidding on a “software” or “platform” keyword and Google matches to things that explicitly do not have that word/intent. A PDF or a template is not a platform, Google. @kytaylor88

@NeptuneMoon AI is the current buzzword just like blockchain was back in 2021. @kytaylor88

@kytaylor88 I had a client that had an airport code as part of their brand name. They were not in aviation or travel and we got matches for airport stuff all the time. @NeptuneMoon

it feels like if they could just go back 5 years in how they determined intent we’d be OK. @Pete_Bowen

I’d like to feel like they still care about intent vs. just trying to make more money. @revaminkoff

@Pete_Bowen It is funny (in a laugh so that you don’t cry type of way) that they tout “we know so much that you don’t so let us just take the reins” and yet they will match milk chocolate and chocolate milk as if they are the same thing. @NeptuneMoon

@NeptuneMoon Intent matching is worse than it has ever been in my experience. I think it’s because they have to sell the subprime ad inventory. @Pete_Bowen

For Google Ads…

1. Give us more information about the effect of negative keywords including showing us the impact of an individual negative keyword.
2. Regular expressions for negative keywords so we can block searches that match a certain pattern.
3. It would be helpful/time-saving to let us use AI/Bard to query for reports and insights. Kind of like the way you can use bard.google.com to query your Gmail right now…but make it actually work so that information could be presented to clients. @Eroncohen

My short list:

1. Unified reporting – Either sync all campaign types within Insights or allows the table + chart view to function for PMax
2. Enhance ROAS bidding – Allow for COGS to feed back into the calculation from a given CMS
3. Clarify conversion counting – Either have GA4 use platform counting or vice versa
4. Impression Share for PMax – Click share is nice, but IS would help determine if there is more room to push into search/shopping inventory within this campaign type @teabeeshell

I wish they would be more clear about new feature rollouts that you are automatically opted into!! I know these things are strategically buried but it is so incredibly frustrating — then this, coupled with the removal of agency reps always makes you feel like you’re missing something a client could find in a live search first. @McKenzie Davis

I wish they’d have people who know what they’re doing write their support docs. I read a page on Google’s official support site today that suggested adding friction to the conversion process to increase lead quality. @Pete_Bowen

Q2: What is on your holiday wish list for PPC clients or stakeholders? What do you wish they knew, did or stopped doing, etc.?

Please stop listening to your nephew/neighbour/guy at the pub who had an idea about Google Ads. @Pete_Bowen

That every client was willing and able to import conversions from their CRM into Google Ads. There are so many technical and client-side hurdles to this currently. @beyondthepaid

Also, stop logging in to your Google Ads account and freaking out about single-day performance shifts. @beyondthepaid

I wish leadership didn’t write ad copy like it was 2005. Not every ad needs a generic CTA like “Click here to learn more”, resonating and empathizing with customer pain points can be just as effective, if not more so. @kytaylor88

For me, it always comes down to understanding business math these days. So few do, but it’s a relatively simply concept: If your desired margin is X%, you retail at $Y (or your AOV is $Y), and your unit-level cost of goods/delivery is $Z, how much can you afford to pay to acquire a new customer? Does that change with LTV over 60 days or 1 year? @teabeeshell

Getting outside tunnel vision (“everyone is our customer” or “we don’t really have competitors because…“) and understanding the actual digital competitive landscape. People are not going to be so blown away by your ad that they only look at your site 99% of the time. You have to know what you’re up against to craft compelling offers. @NeptuneMoon

I had a client tell me recently that they “didn’t believe in seasonality.” @beyondthepaid

@NeptuneMoon The opposite can be just as bad. “What are our competitors doing? Let’s do exactly that.”@kytaylor88

Yes, @kytaylor88 definitely have to have “you can’t assume that what your competitors are doing is successful” as part of the conversation. @NeptuneMoon

I wish clients sometimes had more curiosity about how people view the product or service they offer. Clients can sometimes have very rigid ideas that keep them from growing. It’s frustrating. @NeptuneMoon

I try to tell some of my clients (in a nice way) that only doing SEM is not a viable long-term marketing strategy. I can’t create people searching for you. I also echo the “you can’t assume that what your competitors are doing is successful”.Finally, I go a little crazy when a  clients ask about benchmark data. I’m a pretty big proponent of the “benchmark” being past campaign performance and seeing that improve over time means our “benchmark” is improving as well. That comes with time and consistency. @alexnicoll93

@alexnicoll93 Search advertising captures demand, it does not generate it. So I agree that brands need to invest in both demand capture and demand generation. @NeptuneMoon

I should add in all fairness, I understand why they are asking the benchmark question. I can pull benchmarks from Wordstream or something, I just think the best benchmark is past performance. @alexnicoll93

@alexnicoll93 Great minds. I tweeted about my frustration with benchmarks a while back: https://x.com/teabeeshell/status/1509904539767345155 @teabeeshell

@alexnicoll93 I think the benchmark question comes from a place of wanting to know if they are in the right ballpark with spend, CPCs, conversions, etc. So I get the reasoning behind the ask. But I agree with you that the better question than “How are we doing relative to other brands” is “How can we continue to improve our performance”.@NeptuneMoon

@NeptuneMoon Yes, couldn’t have said it better myself! @alexnicoll93

Can I just have bigger budgets, please? @JuliaVyse

@alexnicoll93 When I came in-house and took over the former agency’s account, I explicitly told my bosses that our LinkedIn account is going to see lower CTR and higher CPM, because the targeting and campaign settings were going to be so different. @kytaylor88

@JuliaVyse For 2024 I’m trying to get my biggest and most successful clients to have a budget set aside specifically for testing. I’m essentially saying we have a solid foundation, now let’s try new stuff and see what works! My goal is that setting a budget aside for testing will provide less pressure on me to have the test perform as well as the foundational stuff. And if it works, then we can add it to our foundational strategy. @alexnicoll93

@alexnicoll93 I had to tell them for basically the first two months, it’s apples to oranges and the only thing to compare was the conversions I was optimizing for moving forward, and overall business performance. @kytaylor88

@alexnicoll93 Because they initially wanted to benchmark my new campaigns against the old ones. @kytaylor88

@kytaylor88 I think that’s a good conversation to have! My experience is almost solely Google Ads, but I’ve had the conversation many times that CTR and CPC don’t matter as much if our CVR and CPA are improving. It just means we’re getting the right people to the landing page. @alexnicoll93

@alexnicoll93 I couldn’t agree more. CVR + CPA should be the guiding lights. @teabeeshell

And if what you’re selling could legit be searched for by audiences you don’t want clicking (think enterprise solution also gets non enterprise searchers or biz solution gets consumer searchers) sometimes you want to have lower CTRs to get higher CVRs. I am sure we have all explained this too at some point! @NeptuneMoon

Honestly, even the CPA/CVR conversation needs some nuance. @kytaylor88

If you switch from optimizing from top-of-funnel lead gen to more bottom-funnel sales contact requests, you’re going to see lower CVR and higher CPA, but it’s offset by higher quality. @kytaylor88

I prefer not to have a CPA /CVR conversation and focus on the value of the leads – how much did we make in sales vs how much did we spend. I think the clients have little to gain by getting into the internal metrics in an ad account. @Pete_Bowen

@kytaylor88 I don’t see this as much nuance as different objectives that don’t warrant the same comparison metrics. @teabeeshell

@Pete_Bowen A leads conversation is certainly a different ballgame than ecomm. Measuring cost-per-outcome though is a basic tenet of the “money in, money out” trade-off of advertising. Unless you can modify/manipulate an advertising strategy based on lead quality, CPA remains valuable. @teabeeshell

Agreed – it’s very difficult to get lead value into Google Ads because you often don’t know the value until many months later. @beyondthepaid

@teabeeshell I agree that CPA is valuable but it’s a metric I prefer not to discuss when we have more downstream information available. Last thing I want is clients getting frothy about getting cheaper leads. @Pete_Bowen

Q3: What is on your holiday wish list for the PPC industry?

One of my wishes is that we can keep this community strong outside of Twitter. I appreciate you all being active in our other channels. @NeptuneMoon

ooooo! I say stronger communities, and selfishly: more events in Canada. or at least North enough that we can actually meet! @JuliaVyse

Also want to hear more points of view! Love our well-known experts, but I know there are so many smarties out there who we need to hear from. @NeptuneMoon

I think live, round-table discussions are invaluable. They are an entertaining, informative format, and they can bring together different POVs.Anyone can shout from a rooftop. Not all can engage in disciplined discussion. @teabeeshell

I wish for a time machine so we could go back and keep you know who from buying and wrecking Twitter. @beyondthepaid

I have been thinking about doing some interviews in 2024 too of different experts. Might be audio, might be posts. @NeptuneMoon

@beyondthepaid But we have so much Free Speech™ now. @kytaylor88

I always aspire to be more involved in the communities. It’s hard to carve out the time! I always appreciate it when I can make it, though. @alexnicoll93

@alexnicoll93 Appreciate you being here when you can. @NeptuneMoon

@NeptuneMoon I appreciate PPC Chat existing. @alexnicoll93

Tongue-in-cheek wish: We retire “PPC” from our vernacular. @teabeeshell

Kidding, I appreciate the name equity the community has earned! @teabeeshell

Listen, I paid to trademark PPC Chat so we are riding it forever. @NeptuneMoon

If you want to keep the group vibrant, invite people to join and attend. @robert_brady

I’m sending out regular messages on all the platforms to get people to join and attend chats. Everyone spreading the word helps too! @NeptuneMoon

PPCChat Participants

• Julia Vyse @JuliaVyse
• Melissa L Mackey @beyondthepaid
• Julie F Bacchini @NeptuneMoon
• Peter Bowen @Pete_Bowen
• Alex Nicoll @alexnicoll93
• Reva Minkoff @revaminkoff
• Kyle Taylor @kytaylor88
• Eron Cohen @Eroncohen
• Travis @teabeeshell
• McKenzie Davis @McKenzie Davis
• Robert Brady @robert_brady

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