Podcast: Budget Wasters in Google and Meta

If you’ve been in digital marketing for a while, you’ll notice that Google and Meta have been making our lives a bit difficult as of late. Here, we discuss the specifics and how you can save ad dollars.

Joe Kim (00:37)

in either the Google Ads platform or the Facebook Ads platform. And over the years, we've just seen all of these different ways that the ad platforms just make our lives a lot harder. We kind of see them as, let's call them platform revenue generators. so we see them as ways that, let's be honest, I think they're intentional.

that they make your ad accounts less efficient for their own gain. So I think we're just going to take turns and talk about which of our favorite changes or features that are in the platform. And we can probably just leave in the show notes, hey, here's the list of things that we think that you should either not use or double check to make sure that they're not defaulted on and that kind of thing.

So yeah, I'll go ahead and start. Our favorite one this year is actually from our good friends over at Meta. And what they did is they decided that they didn't want us to do audience exclusions anymore. So our approach has always been like we try to narrowly target like different personas through different interest targetings. And you know,

in order to keep those audiences clean, we'll say like, hey, there's this audience and then we'll exclude interests from other audiences that we're using. So we're not like overlapping. So for some reason, Meta decided that that was not something they wanted us to do anymore. And when you're at what trillion dollar market cap organization, bringing in billions of billions of dollars a quarter, I'm kinda like, mm.

Why'd you do that? Don't tell me you don't have the resources to add that little tiny feature. So we had to change some of our strategies as far as audience building to accommodate for that. I think it inherently made the ad platform less efficient. And I think we're seeing some increased CPMs year over year. I'm not.

sure that specifically due to that there's all kinds of things that go into an increased EPM but that just certainly did not help. that's my favorite one for this year. John, what's your favorite one?

John (03:14)

My favorite one there's there's quite a few If if we wanted to stick within Metta I would say I'm just kind of looking through they've added so many different things like AI features To the ad builder these days and I know Calvin was gonna talk about advantage plus creative and assets

But just a few other things that I see in here. This isn't relatively new, but multi-advertiser ads where your ads appear alongside other ads in different placements. it's really just taking a little bit more control away from you in where your ads are going to appear. So it's always

Joe Kim (03:53)

Hmm.

John (04:07)

good practice that we turn those off. One of the things that I really like to do, and this is just good context for ad building and meta in general, is retain as much control as you possibly can. Don't let meta, serve ads, don't give them the extra leash to serve ads over here, serve ads over there, change your creative, change your copy.

So multi-advertiser is really one thing that I always ensure is turned off. The other thing that is relatively new are meta site links. And we're kind of going back and forth about these. think that they will be beneficial if you control them, which you can, and add them where applicable.

But the auto-generated sitelinks, to take a step back and explain what this is, it is essentially, once you put the destination into an ad, Meta will scan that page and say, hey, there's a lot of information on this page. If it's a product detail page, Meta will probably bring in other categories of products and say your

just a sporting goods retailer and you have a category for like soccer gear and baseball gear and whatnot. Like you might be running an ad to a product in directly to a PDP for a soccer product and Meadow will say, well, I also see at the top of the page you have all these other categories. So here's a site link to the football gear. Here's a site link to the golf gear.

or whatnot. it's, and it really fills it out. I think it lets you add up to 15. Maybe don't quote me on that number, but it will fill out 15 with whatever it deems relevant, most of which are completely irrelevant to that specific ad. And like I said, there's probably a time and a place for these. We haven't dug into it too deeply yet, but we think if you can control it, adding some more click options wouldn't be the worst thing.

just a chance to raise engagement and get some traffic to your site. But again, even if those are controlled, it is pulling away a little bit of the control that you have because, you a user, you could have a perfect ad set up to land on this PDP or this collection page or this specifically made LP. And then, you know, a user gets distracted by a site link and clicks on that. Now you're still getting traffic to your site. That's great.

Joe Kim (06:45)

Yeah, yep.

John (06:48)

but it's really kind of destroying the intent of the ad itself and again, taking away some control from you. So I would say the two things I would call out are the multi-advertiser ads and the site links, auto-generated especially on Meta.

Joe Kim (07:06)

Yeah, and that's kind of something we see with anything that's kind of like auto-generated these days. Like if you aren't careful, like they'll just generate everything for you. I mean, as I think anything AI generated goes these days, like it's like, it can be okay, but you definitely want to like keep an eye on it. And you know, you don't want to let just anything go on out there. So yeah, that's a good one. Calvin, what's on your mind?

Calvin (07:29)

Yeah,

it's definitely important to be able to oversee everything and be able to make sure you know exactly what an ad is going to look like in the wild once you put it out there. And a big issue that seems to happen with Meta and their Advantage Plus Creative specifically is they use AI to do a lot of different things like enhance

Joe Kim (07:34)

You

Calvin (07:57)

They use like, sorry, let me just look here real quick. So in Advantage Plus, they do a bunch of things that if you're not careful, a lot of these are checked on by default. So it's important to go within the platform and control these things, but there's things like visual touch-ups where they will expand your image to fit a certain placement, like story. Say you have a lifestyle image of your product.

Meta will actually extend the top and bottom just to make it fit. You don't know exactly what that's going to look like until it's actually out in the wild. And there's other things like music and adapting multiple images as a video slideshow. And sometimes with music, they'll just put a random song that you don't choose and it could...

be damaging to a brand image or the brand voice of a company. You know, when you have random things happening like that.

Joe Kim (09:02)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. this, again, just automated junk that it's

supposed to make your ad better, but it just ends up just trashing your image. So yeah. So I think we've kind of shit on Facebook pretty hard. So let's change gears over to Google for maybe a little bit. I don't know about... yeah.

Calvin (09:13)

Yeah.

John (09:23)

Joe, before we go to Google,

Calvin hit on one really, really important point that I want to reiterate. A lot of these new features and functionality that we just discussed, the multi-advertiser, the site links, the auto-generated variations of copy and images, and then all of the image and creative enhancement, a lot of that stuff, Meta, will have just auto-turned-on.

Calvin (09:44)

What is this speaker? What's that?

John (09:52)

So like not only do you have to like be aware of this stuff, like you'll have to go in there and actively turn this stuff off. And I've seen just, you know, we build our ads out in staging campaigns and I have seen where Meta, like when you're deploying something from a staging campaign into one of your actual live campaigns, like it will.

Auto toggle some of that stuff back on even if you had it off. So it's something you have to constantly be vigilant about. You have to know where these things are and it has to be built into like your kind of preflight checklist for pushing ads live just every time you push an ad live, just like scroll through and it's like check off, check off, check off every time. So that was a really important point that Calvin brought up and I just wanted to double down on.

Joe Kim (10:22)

right, right,

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, John, because, yeah, it's one of those things where, like, you turn the thing on and just won't, the damn thing won't stay off, right? Like, and that's a huge pain that we have to deal with all the time. So, yeah, that's good insight.

Calvin (10:47)

Yeah.

Yeah, I think ultimately they try to

make it a little bit more user friendly for the average person to start advertising on their platform. Especially people that aren't educated and knowledgeable about these things, which is why I think it's important for people to see this video because there's things that they do that will make it easier for you to get something out in the wild and for your, you know, to create variations for your ads. But at the same time,

Joe Kim (11:08)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Calvin (11:27)

You have to be careful with certain aspects like the creative advantage plus.

Joe Kim (11:30)

Yep, 100%.

Yep, good stuff.

Okay, let's see. I know we wrote like a whole blog article about, you know, eight ways that Google wastes your ad budget. So, you know, we'll try to stay away from some of those topics that are already covered. We'll add the link to that blog post in the show notes here.

I think something that we've always kind of joked about is how much broad match, how terrible it is. But actually recently we've started to see phrase match actually start to act quite a bit more like broad match. One of the kind of recent things that we've seen in the search query report was, I mean...

So I can't remember what exactly what the search query is, but the search term included zero actual words from the phrase match search keyword. So that's something brand new. I've never seen it that egregious in terms of what it's supposed to match. from my experience, and I've been in Google Ads for 13 years now, phrase match means that phrase is

in the search query and apparently that's not what it means anymore. So that's definitely raised some flags for us in our internal processes to say like, okay, we've got to be really, really vigilant on the search query report.

You know, with other marketers, you know, running search campaigns, like, hey, yeah, we're doing, you know, we focus primarily on like exacting phrase match and then sometimes we'll run a broad match in like either a different ad group or maybe even a different campaign. But yeah, it seems like Google has, they understand that that's what the smarter marketers are doing and they're just being like, eh, you don't get to do that anymore. So yeah, most recently it seems like phrase match has gotten ruined.

as well. So that's a new thing for this year that you know we're gonna try to keep a really really close eye on. So all the search marketers out there you know you're not safe with phrase match anymore either. So I gotta be hyper vigilant on that search query report.

John, what are you saying this year?

Calvin (13:52)

Yeah.

John (13:55)

Well, not as much different in Google than in Meta. I will say that. one of the things that I know we've already kind of rehashed this or we spoke about this already in other blogs, maybe even in other reels that we've done. But one of the key things that I always make sure is toggled off in Google account is the search network and the display network.

Joe Kim (14:22)

yeah. Yep.

Absolutely.

John (14:23)

That

is, and just reading it directly from Google, it's ads can appear near Google search results and other Google sites when people search for your terms that are relevant to your keywords. And that's including Google search partners. So Joe, correct me if I'm wrong here, but that is essentially saying that if some tiny little blog

on some super niche topic as a partner with Google, you could potentially be running an ad on their site, which is likely completely irrelevant. Their traffic would be irrelevant to the traffic that you're trying to get to your site. Yeah, so that's search network and the display network is, they say it's an easy way to get additional conversions at similar or lower costs than search with unused search budget. Yeah.

Joe Kim (15:02)

Yeah, yeah, that's what that means more or less.

That's cute

John (15:16)

Yeah, so those

are two things that we always ensure are toggled off. again, it all just comes back to maintaining as much control over your ads as possible by every facet possible.

Joe Kim (15:30)

Yep, yeah, and those are easy because as soon as you build the campaign, there's just two of these little check boxes. Just make sure they're unchecked.

John (15:36)

And again, they will be defaulted on. You have to toggle them off.

Joe Kim (15:38)

Yep,

yep, little things like that. Calvin, what about you? What's your favorite Google feature?

Calvin (15:50)

Yeah, so I actually wanted to piggyback off of the meta discussion and how meta has removed exclusions from their audience targeting. I wanted to kind of carry that into PMAX because in PMAX, they don't allow for negative keywords. So you can't do brand exclusions unless you go through this convoluted series of menus where you have to go through this whole process to make sure.

Joe Kim (16:04)

yeah.

Calvin (16:19)

you have a list of terms that you don't want to appear in. They did make it a little bit simpler recently for brand terms, but say one of our clients, for example, their name is also the name of an animal. So, Sololurus, right? So, I think it's important to be able to negate some terms around, you know,

Joe Kim (16:35)

yeah, yep.

Calvin (16:47)

the brand name, you know. Say like the brand has multiple meanings or the product actually, you know, the name of the product could mean multiple things. I think it's good for us to be able to.

exclude those ones to make sure we're appearing in the right searches. PMAX is meant for simplicity and to allow the algorithm to find your audience, but at the same time, I think maintaining a certain level of control as to what search terms you show up on is important, and they made it very, very difficult to exclude.

Joe Kim (17:23)

Yeah, because you have

to submit like a support ticket and they've got like some template that you have to fill things out in and then you send it into them and then wait like 10 to 14 business days and then you've got a negative keyword right like it's pretty bad. Yeah.

Calvin (17:38)

It's a pretty tough process and you have

to dig into documentation quite a bit to get to that point.

Joe Kim (17:45)

Yeah, and again, we're talking about Alphabet here. This is an organization with the best software engineers in the world and literally infinite money. So why you're making this so difficult is like, I don't know, buddy.

So well, but unfortunately it is what it is, but part of us having this discussion is to help kind of get that information out there so that when you necessarily have to run Google Ads to grow your business, at least you're not running into these little potholes.

John (18:22)

One other thing that occurred to me when Calvin brought up PMAX is the actual photo asset portion of PMAX now. Google, again, just trying to make it simpler for somebody who is not experienced in the platform, just making it super easy to build out an ad. One of the things that they will do is typically to

Joe Kim (18:31)

yeah.

John (18:50)

add the images to a PMAX asset group, you would manually upload the images that you want. then Google does make it easy to crop those images into the right sizes for the placement. So kudos to Google on that. That's really nice. It's really easy to do. But Google will also, aside from letting you upload images, they will also automatically pull images from your website.

Into that and they will also Say hey, it looks like you're selling You know again, I'll say sporting goods Here's some stock photos of just people playing sports in different sporting goods as well And you know if you're a savvy Marketer you'll pick up on that and you'll see obviously like these are not my images and they're even in another section however, one thing that we ran into

being an agency, and this is where you just have to be really careful. As an agency, we inherit a lot of accounts that are already active. And one of the big things that we do when a client gets onboarded is to try to learn as much about the company and the brand as possible, but you're obviously not going to be as good as somebody internal. And if you inherit an account and you're building out a PMAX campaign,

There's likely images in there already uploaded from previous managers. And, you know, you just have to keep a really sharp eye in those separate sections because you might say like, Hey, this is a great image. And then you realize like, that's either AI or, that's a stock photo. That's not one of their photos. So there are some pitfalls, with a P max images. You just have to be careful. It gives you kind of the headings of like.

Joe Kim (20:32)

Yup. Yup.

John (20:40)

library, which is like the already uploaded and then from your website and then like, forget specifically what it is auto generated or whatnot. But, but that's one other thing to really be careful of when you're building out a PMAX campaign, especially if you're with an agency inheriting an already active account.

Joe Kim (20:58)

Yeah, absolutely. yeah, to your point, John, like we've cleaned up a lot of that stuff in the past when we've taken on new plans.

Nice, well I think there's some good nuggets in there. Hopefully this, you know, we'll try to add specifics in the show notes and kind of follow up with blog posts, et cetera, but you know, there's all kinds of stuff like this in any of the ad platforms. You know, we do Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Amazon, and you while we're not talking about them today, they're definitely not innocent either. So maybe we'll follow up with another discussion there, but hopefully everyone

listening in on this discussion today has gotten something tangible that will help them to run some more efficient ad campaigns. So yeah, if you enjoyed the discussion, give us a follow on the socials, like and subscribe to the video. And also we've got our email newsletter that goes out monthly with more information like this. So get in touch with us and we will see you later. Thanks everyone.