How I Made My First Solo Trip (Part 2/3)

I hope you find yourself very well!

Here I continue with my personal story about how I got into this world of solo travel.

The last time I was telling you how I changed to live alone after breaking up with my partner in Caracas (actually it was a pause, which later became a definitive break).

But Venezuela did not have the best conditions to work remotely (I am a digital marketing consultant), so I decided to do something even more radical.I decided to spend the second half of my trip in Colombia.

I could have returned to my country (Chile), but my return flight left Bogotá in a month and a half.

So I decided to wait it out and enjoy the rest of my trip.But I decided to do things right this time.

I took the time to research the best cities, the best neighborhoods, what to do and what not to do.

I became completely obsessed with solo travel safety, after all the scares I went through in Venezuela.

It took me a lot of time and effort, but it was worth it.I had an amazing time staying in Colombia alone, spending a month in Medellin as a “digital nomad”.

I even spent 10 days on vacation in Cartagena, before returning to my country.

It wasn’t easy, but this decision was one of the best I’ve ever made!

So cheer up!

Sometimes the circumstances of life lead us to take somewhat uncomfortable steps, but that result in a lot of growth.

In my next email I will tell you about some of the experiences I had in Colombia and how you (yes, you!), can start your adventure in your favorite destination (hint: it all starts with your MENTALITY).

All the best,

Juan Pablo

P.S.: Remember to follow me on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/juanpablocangas) and send me your questions or comments here or in a DM if you want me to talk about it in a future post.

How I Made My First Solo Trip (Part 1/3)

In this post I will tell you a little about my personal story and how I got into this world of solo travel… I think it can be very inspiring!

The story is a bit long, but I will try to summarize it.

My first solo trip was in a country you wouldn’t imagine… Venezuela (I don’t recommend going to that country at all if you’re not Venezuelan, you’ll see why).

In 2019, my partner at the time had to go visit his father there.

We decided to go together and stay for a couple of months and a half. To save costs, the idea was to cross over land from a Colombian city called Cúcuta, to Venezuela.

But on the border with Venezuela they were not letting anyone pass who was not Venezuelan or Colombian.
She could pass, but I couldn’t. We tried for days without success.

It got to the point where they started searching my bags for no reason, and one person was even talking about putting me in jail (!).

In the end, they offered to let me cross the border… if I bribed them. I didn’t want to do something illegal, so I had to book a flight, with money I didn’t have, to go directly to Caracas. It was possible they would let me in this way.

I finally arrived in Caracas, but after many frustrations and scares at the border. Not to mention the time and money wasted…

Some time later, I learned that the land bridge between Colombia and Venezuela and its surroundings was one of the most dangerous places on the PLANET.

The Colombian and Venezuelan armies regularly skirmished and killed each other (in horrible ways) on that very bridge I wanted to cross.

All of that could have been easily avoided just by looking at a little web page that I’ll tell you about some another time.

Finally, we arrived at my ex-father-in-law’s house. Things were going well…for a while. We’d had a lot of relationship problems over the past few months, and finally…

We broke up… in the middle of the trip.

I moved to live alone for a few weeks in Caracas.

In my next post I will tell you how the story of my first solo trip continues and the unexpected twist it has. In addition, I will tell you the first KEY element that will allow you to start or improve on your solo trips.

All the best,

Juan Pablo

P.S.: I love hearing from my readers and how I can help them. So if you have any specific questions about the process of traveling solo, don’t hesitate to reply to this post or send me a DM on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/juanpablocangas/)!

Solo travel mastery starts here

Hey,


I’m Juan Pablo Cangas and I welcome you to my blog about solo travel (and how to not “die” trying).

In these posts you will learn the secrets I personally use to solo travel safely and making the most of my time and money. Even if you have already taken some steps in this direction, I am sure that you will learn something new.


I will tell you the things that I wish I had known when I started this adventure!


What you want to do is not an easy thing, but it is very worthwhile, and I am happy to be able to accompany you to take the first steps, or help you improve your current travel experience so that it is much more pleasant and with fewer worries.


Also, from time to time I will recommend some products and services that can be useful in your adventures.


While in some cases I will earn commissions for these referrals, rest assured that quality and customer service is one of the things I carefully evaluate before giving any referrals.
If you have any questions or a topic you would like me to talk about, don’t hesitate to reply to this email with your concerns or suggestions!


Also, I invite you to follow me on Instagram… and we will be in touch very soon:


https://www.instagram.com/juanpablocangas


Happy trips,


Juan Pablo


P.S.: In my next post I will tell you a little about my personal story and how I got into this world of solo travel… I think it can be very inspiring!

How to Fix An Underperforming Google Ads Account, Step by Step  – Day 4 (Thursday)

This is post N° 6 in my series of posts about Google Ads step-by-step daily optimization routines (see the introduction here, and the general Google Ads optimization routine overview here, the Monday routine here, the Tuesday routine here, and the Wednesday routine here).

So, if it’s Thursday and your Google Ads account is underperforming (make sure you read my criteria for Google Ads underperformance first HERE), this is what you should do.

Thursday is a relatively relaxed day, when you check and adjust your bids again.

However, unlike Monday, where you checked budget pacing and budget allocation, and adjust both auto and manual bidding, you will only be adjusting manual bidding this day.

You can do the budget checks if you’re in an unusual situation, or getting close to the end of the month (to make sure you don’t underspend or overspend), but most of the time you can leave that alone until next Monday.

The reason why you won’t be adjusting automatic bidding, and only do that once a week on Monday, preferably on Monday, is that we will give time for the auto-bidding algorithm do its thing.

In fact, it could even be argued that adjusting auto-bids once a week is too much. But many times you are under strict KPI targets and you can’t afford to wait that long to make adjustments if you’re not happy with the current results.

The bid-changing process was explained on the Monday routine post – just follow those instructions.

Another thing you should do on Thursday, is to change bid adjustments for locations, ad schedules (day parting) and devices.

The process is pretty much the same as with campaign/ad group/keyword bid optimization that we discussed for Monday.

The only difference is, here you should be looking at a 30-day date range when doing your analysis.

Reason being, these are more “structural” elements, and typically more stable than ad groups/keywords, so it makes sense to base your changes on a broader time horizon.

You can also skip this check some weeks (unless your under-performance is really bad), because as you will probably notice, sometimes there just won’t be much to change anyways.

Conclusion

Like I said, Thursday is a relatively relaxed day, when you will be just making changes to manual bidding elements (which these days are used less and less), and maybe changing bids to locations/schedules/device bids.

P.S.: If you need help with your Google Ads, go here to book a free consultation with me.

How to Fix An Underperforming Google Ads Account, Step by Step  – Day 3 (Wednesday)

This is post N° 5 in my series of posts about Google Ads step-by-step daily optimization routines (see the introduction post here, the general overview here, the Monday routine here, and the Tuesday routine here).

Well, if it’s Wednesday and your Google Ads account is underperforming, this is what you should do.

This is the day to check any split tests (also called A/B tests) you are running, and see if it’s the right time to make any decisions

This day is when the “art and science” aspects of Marketing come together, as you will be relying both on math & statistics and your copywriting abilities to optimize your account. It can be time-intensive and will require a good dose of creativity, so be ready to do the work.

Like always, we will follow the 80/20 principle, so you shouldn’t go crazy and try to split test ads in all your ad groups one by one. Although you can create ad experiments at the account level, which can be effective, and this is something I’m currently testing.

I have two ways to pick which ad groups to optimize.

The “quick & dirty” way, when you are short of time, is to just pick the top 20% of campaigns or ad groups that have spent the most over the last 30 days, and optimize those.

The better but more time-consuming process is as follows:

  1. Find any campaigns that over the last 30 days:
    1. Are under-performing (remember the two-fold criteria I explained on my overview post)
    1. Have seen negative changes in conversion rate (use the “compare” function in the date selector and then sort by % change in conversion rate)
    1. Have received a decent amount of traffic (for example, more than 100 clicks, or 1,000 clicks, depending on the scale of your account)

By doing this, you raise the odds that the ad groups you optimize will have enough data on them for the split test to be valid. Maybe not completely, scientifically valid (because most accounts I have seen are not setup correctly for split-testing), but at least somewhat valid.

This selection criteria also raises the odds that any changes you make to the ads will actually help improve your account’s performance.

You can also do this analysis at the ad group level. It depends on how big your account is and how much time you have available.

Regardless of if you analyze at the campaign or ad group level, just focus on the worse 20% of campaigns or ad groups.

Once you have identified your targets, open the ad groups, select a relevant time period (I prefer to use “All Time”, unless a significant website/landing page was done at some point in time, which can skew the results. In that case, I would select from that date forward).

Now you might think that at this point you should just go ahead and pause the worst performers for each ad group you selected.

Wrong.

There’s an additional step you need to do. You need to check for what’s called “statistical significance”.

This concept basically means how confident you can be that your split testing results are true, and not just due to blind luck or chance.

In general, the more data you have, and the greater of a different result you see from 2 different ads, the more likely they will truly perform different on the long run. That means you can confidently pause a loser ad and keep a winner ad.

If you roll a dice 2 times, and it comes up on the number 3 both times, you wouldn’t conclude there is something wrong with the dice, right? It was probably just random chance that the dice did that, and you wouldn’t bet money on that happening again if you were to roll the dice another 2 times.

This is why it’s dangerous to make decisions when you have too little data.

But if you roll the dice 100 times, and it ALWAYS or almost always comes up on the number 3, you would suspect the dice is loaded, and it’s very likely it will come up on 3 most of the time again, if you were to roll it another 100 times. And you would probably be willing to make a bet on that, and you would probably win.

It’s the same with ads.

There is a tool you can use to check the statistical significance of a split test.

After you have identified your ad groups to test, visit this website:

https://peakconversion.com/2012/02/ab-split-test-graphical-calculator/

Here you can enter the numbers from your ads.

You can test a maximum of 4 ads per ad group with this tool. If you have more, you can just go ahead and pause the worst performers, or the ones that have the least traffic, and make a vow with yourself to never do that again.

I like testing just 2 ads per ad group, MAYBE 3. The more you have, the longer it will likely take to get a statistically significant result.

With the split testing calculator, you need to enter the amount of clicks for each ad on the “trials” column, and the amount of conversions on the “successes” column. If you have multiple conversion types, pick the one that is most valuable to your business. You also need to click the “include” checkbox next to each row for each ad that you want to include in the calculation.

Once you click “Calculate”, the tool will spit out values for each ad on the “Apprx probability of being best” column. The higher this number is, the more you can trust that a winning ad is effectively the best.

Scientifically and statistically, a 95%+ value is considered good and reliable. But depending on the amount of traffic and the market response, it might take too long to get to 95% certainty for a particular test.

And since we are not doing science here, but business decisions under uncertainty and risk in a competitive and constantly changing marketplace, in some cases it’s better to settle for a lower value, say 90%, 85% or 80%. I think it’s better to make lots of decisions, even if you sometimes get it wrong, than to sit and wait and do nothing.

The minimum value you choose to accept will depend on how much it bothers you to make the wrong decision occasionally – for example, if you pick a winner with an 80% probability of being best, it has a 20% probability of actually being worse than the rest of the ads.

If you end up pausing the loser ads and keeping a winner, you will now have just one ad on that same group.

You should always be testing 2 ads on your most important ad groups, but if you have a lot of other ad groups to check, and don’t have enough time to write a new ad, you can leave it is as it is for now, and add another ad to test when you can.

If you decide to test a new ad, a quick & easy way to do that is to shuffle the order of your headlines & descriptions. Ideally, just change one variable at a time, for example, swapping out headline 1 for headline 2, and vice versa, and leaving everything else the same.

An important thing to do at this point is change your ad rotation settings. In order to run an effective and fair test, you want the traffic to be split more or less evenly between the different ads you are testing.

However, by default Google will use the “Optimize: Prefer best performing ads” setting, which will send more traffic to some ads that it believes will work better, and less to others.

This setting is not good for doing a fair test, so you need to change it to “Do not optimize: Rotate ads indefinitely”, either at the ad group or campaign level (I prefer to do it at the campaign level, so I don’t have to worry about this setting again).

Another thing I like to do, is setup a “triangle” of ads. The way this is done, is you create a copy of your old winning ad, and alongside it, a new challenger ad.

You give the 2 new ads (remember, one of them is just a copy of the old winner) a few days to run, and then you pause the old winner.

This way, you don’t disrupt the ad group too much, by allowing Google to continue sending traffic to the “warmed up” old ad, while the new ones get started.

And that’s it, this is how you properly A/B test ads.

You can do this procedure every week if you want, not only if your account is underperforming, as long as you make sure your results are statistically significant before making any changes.

P.S.: If you need help with your Google Ads, go here to book a free consultation with me.

How to Fix An Underperforming Google Ads Account, Step by Step  – Day 2 (Tuesday)

This is post N° 4 in my series of posts about Google Ads step-by-step daily optimization routines (see the introduction post here, the general overview here, and the Monday routine here).

Alright, so if Tuesday comes and your Google Ads account is underperforming, this is what you should do.

This is one of the easiest days. All you have to do is go to your Search Terms report, and check for new keywords to add or remove from your account.

Make sure you select the proper date range.

Looking at the last 7 days worth of search terms data is a good rule of thumb, although you might have to expand the range if you have a lot of junk traffic, if your budget is high, or if you have broad match keywords, which tend to trigger a wide range of different search terms, that should be audited.

Any search terms that have converted and make sense, you should add as new keywords to their respective add group. You can do this from the search terms report interface itself.

I typically add these keywords as “exact match”. This means, if someone searches for something that matches exactly or is pretty close to what your new keyword is, it should show your ads for that search term.

To add a keywords as exact match, you need to type your new keyword between bracket signs, like this: [new keyword]

Make sure you do this, because if you add the bracket signs, the keyword will be added by default as broad match, which in most cases will not give you good results.

In some cases, when I need more traffic from a particular ad group or campaign, I also add these new keywords as “phrase match”. This means that it will work as an exact match first, but if someone searches for something that CONTAINS a closely related version of your keyword, it should show your ads for that search term as well.

For example, a phrase match keyword “red shoes” will not only trigger ads when someone searches for that, but also for other phrases that contain that keyword, like “buy red shoes” or “red shoes near me”.

To add a keyword as phrase match, you type it between quote marks, like this: “your keyword”.

Phrase match will get you more traffic that exact match, but it could be slightly less relevant traffic. If you already have added a keyword as exact match from the Google Ads interface, you will have to repeat the process, and add it again, but this time as phrase match.

Now, you also need to add as negative keywords any search terms that are not relevant.

The process is quite similar to adding positive keywords.

However, you need to be extra careful with match types.

Most of the time, you should be adding negative keywords as exact match. If you add them as phrase or broad match, you could end up blocking a large portion of good traffic.

Although, in some cases it might be a good idea to add negative keywords as phrase match, so you can block certain keywords or phrases that repeatedly signal low quality traffic.

For example, you might want to add as phrase match negative keywords such as “free”, “bargain”, etc. That means that any search query that contains those words won’t trigger your ads.

Even if your account is performing well, doing this will make it work even better, so this one of the changes that you can safely do as often as you want. Once a week is probably enough in most cases.

Also, if you haven’t done this in a long time (or ever), it might be a great idea to review your older search terms reports.

So, you could audit the last 30 days worth of search terms, or the last 3 months, the last year, or even the entire time your account has been running ads, and find some goldmine new keywords for your account based on conversion data, or some hidden offenders that should be barred from triggering your ads in the future.

P.S.: If you need help with your Google Ads, go here to book a free consultation with me.

How to Fix An Underperforming Google Ads Account, Step by Step  – Day 1 (Monday)

This is post N° 3 in my series of posts about Google Ads step-by-step daily optimization routines (see the introduction here, and the general Google Ads optimization routine overview here).

Alright, so as I was saying on my previous article (make sure you read it first HERE), with my weekly Google Ads optimization routine, Monday is one of the hardest days, when you have to do more work if your account is underperforming.

Step 1: Check your “budget pacing” (current and projected ad spend)

The first thing you need to do on Monday is check your current ad spend for the month, vs. how much you are supposed to spend by the end of the month.

In an ideal world, if an account is performing well, the budget should be infinite.

Why limit yourself if you have a machine that spits out $5 for every $1 you put in?

However, in many cases there are cashflow limitations, stock/scale limitations, credit card limits, etc. For those reasons, we usually deal with limited budgets.

The idea is to have an even spend on a daily basis, as much as possible, so you get a steady flow of leads and sales, you give steady data to Google Ads’ algorithm (which helps with optimization), and you don’t get any surprises by the end of the month, such as overspending or underspending your monthly budget.

You don’t want your daily ad spend to look like a rollercoaster, but more like a flat horizontal line.

This is what is called “budget pacing”.

This is not a sexy topic, in fact it’s quite boring, but it’s really important.

Let’s say today is Monday, August 15th , 2022.

August has 31 days, and by this date, assuming you do this on the morning, 14 days have passed, so you should have spent 14/31 = 45.16% of your monthly budget.

Now, let’s say your budget is $10,000/month, and you have already spent $6,000.

That’s 60% of your budget. This is higher than the correct pacing of 45.16% of the budget by August 15th.

This is problem N° 1: You’re overspending.

Since August has 31 days, your daily ad spend should be an average of $10,000/31 = $322.58

But you’re spending a lot more than that.

Since you have spent $6,000, and 14 days have gone by, you have spent an average of  $6,000/14 = $428.57.

Let’s say also that you have spent $4,000 over the last 7 days. That means you have spent an average of $4,000/7 = $571.42 per day.

Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if over the last 7 days your daily ad spend has been what it should have, given how much days in the month you have left.

So let’s calculate that first.

By August 15th, you have 17 days left (including the 15th), and since you have spent $6,000 already, you have $4,000 left to spend.

Your daily ad spend from now until the end of the month should be $4,000/17 = $235.29, in order to precisely hit $10,000 in ad spend by the end of the month.

Your actual average daily ad spend (over the last 7 days) should be equal or slightly less than this amount, so you don’t end up overspending or underspending.

But $571.42 (your daily average ad spend over the last 7 days) is a lot more than $235.29

Oh-oh.

This is problem N° 2:

You’re not only overspending (when considering the whole month), but you’re spending at a faster daily rate than you should, and if this continues, by the end of the month you will have spent a lot more than you were supposed to (about $15,700, instead of $10,000).

Alright, so how do we fix this, so you don’t get your head chopped off by the end of the month?

Simple, you just need to bring your average daily ad spend to what it’s supposed to be, i.e. $235.29, instead of the current $571.42.

So, you have to decrease your average daily ad spend by about $300 (exactly $571.42 – $235.29 = $336.13).

The easiest way to do this is to change your total daily budget across all campaigns by a fixed percentage.

In this case, the percentage you need to adjust is:

Ideal daily average ad spend/Actual daily average ad spend/ = 235.29/571.42= 41.18%

So, you need to decrease your daily ad spend by about 41.18%.

Notice I said “daily average ad spend”, because there is a difference between how much you give as a budget in the platform to a campaign, and what it actually spends.

If, on the other hand, the situation was that you’re UNDER-spending, you would need to increase your daily ad spend accordingly. The process is the same, namely:

  1. Figure out what’s the right daily ad spend, depending on how much budget and days in the month you have left
  2. Figure out what’s the actual average ad spend over the last 7 days
  3. Increase the daily average ad spend as per the formula above

Important: Like many things in SEM/PPC, this is not an exact science, and you might find that even if you increase/decrease your daily budget by the right amount, what is actually spent is not the same.

This is normal and to be expected. Traffic patterns fluctuate all the time – that’s why I recommend a weekly budget check. Actually, once you’re getting close to the end of the month, it’s better to do these checks more often, just in case.

Also, some campaigns might be hitting the limit in terms of how many impressions are available, so even if you give them more budget, they won’t spend it. However, if a campaign is spending its current daily budget most of the time, it should be able to accommodate a higher budget and actually spend it.

If your account is currently performing well (i.e. it hasn’t met my 2-fold criteria for underperformance), this is all you have to do on Monday.

However, if your account is underperforming, you will need to perform and additional budget adjustment.

Step 2: Rebalance your budgets

This is what I call the “budget rebalance” method. It’s very similar to balancing a stock portfolio.

The logic here is, just like in the stock market, some campaigns will perform better than others over time. And this is constantly changing.

So, in order to get a good performance consistently over time, you need to re-allocate budgets between campaigns every so often (I recommend once a week or more), so that the best performing campaigns are always getting a corresponding percentage of the total budget.

This helps ensure that you hit your KPIs by the end of the month.

If a campaign is working well, put more budget into it. And if a campaign is not working well, take budget away from it (and give it to the best performers).

Simple.

It’s just like rebalancing a stock portfolio.

There’s no exact recipe for this, but I like the following method:

  1. Sort your campaigns in descending order by cost per conversion (cost per sale or cost per lead)
  2. Reduce the budget from the worst campaign by 20%, and give that budget (the amount, not the percentage) to your best campaign (should be at the bottom or near the bottom of the list)
  3. Go to the second worst campaign and repeat the process, but with a slightly lower percentage (e.g. 15%), and give that budget to your second best performer
  4. And so on

This way, you are making the biggest changes to your worst and best performing campaigns, basically inverting their budgets, and doing the same but in a smaller (proportional) scale with the rest of the campaigns.

Step 3: Adjust your bids

Another thing you should do on Mondays is adjust your bids (both automated and manual).

But you can probably guess what I’m going to say now – do NOT touch your bids if your account is performing just fine!

So if indeed your bids need adjustments, do this:

Set your date range to the last 7 days.

For anything that’s working well, you can either leave it alone (if you have a limited budget), or give it a higher bid (so you get more traffic & conversions from that element, assuming you have the budget).

Anything that’s underperforming, should get its bid reduced, so it gets less traffic.

If you want to do this the quick & dirty way, just change your bids at the campaign level (if you are using Maximize Clicks with a Max CPC, this is actually the only way).

You don’t need to change bids at the ad group or keyword level, unless you want a finer degree of control, but this will take you a lot longer, especially if your account is complex.

Regardless, the general procedure for changing bids is making small changes, depending on how far off you are from your goal KPI. Especially with automated bidding, you don’t want to change your bids by more than, say, 20%, because that could throw the bidding algorithm out of whack.

For example, if your target cost per conversion is $30, but a campaign/ad group/keyword is giving you $50, you need to drop the bid on that element by 20%. And depending on how things go, you might have to do this again in a few days (next Thursday or Monday).

You can also choose to pause those elements if your account is REALLY out of KPIs.

This is kind of an extreme measure, as it’s never good to pause elements (especially campaigns or ad groups), because you reset the optimization algorithm. But it will stop the bleeding, and you can try unpausing those elements again later, once your account is performing within your KPIs.

If your target cost per conversion is $30 and you have elements giving you $10, you can increase the bid on those elements by 20%, so you get more traffic from them. Or you can just leave them alone if you don’t have more budget.

If an element is close to your target cost per conversion of $30 (for example, $25 or $35), the bid adjustment should be more gradual, such as 10% or 5% in either direction (positive or negative).

There is another “secret” technique for bid optimization that I learned more than a decade ago from a PPC course, and I haven’t seen it taught anywhere else. However, I only teach this secret technique to my coaching clients (and apply it myself to my full-service client’s accounts). If you’re interested in that, click here to book a no-obligation consultation with me.

Conclusion

Well, I hope all that mumbo-jumbo made sense to you!

I wasn’t kidding when I told you Mondays are complicated…

The good news is, if you did this process correctly, the rest of the week should be more relaxed, and as your budget and bid adjustments kick in, your account should get closer to your KPIs as the days go by.

P.S.: If you need help with your Google Ads, go here to book a free consultation with me.

How to Fix An Under-performing Google Ads Account, Step by Step (Overview)

If your Google Ads account is under-performing (as discussed on my previous article, make sure you read it so you don’t make unnecessary changes), this is what I recommend doing every day.

This is a general overview. In the future, I will be creating specific how-to’s for each day of the week.

Again, most of these tasks should only be done when you see under-performance on that day, as defined by the two-fold criteria I explained last time.

The only exception is Monday, because if you don’t do the budget check each week (regardless of performance), you could end up overspending by the end of the month.

Monday

Monday is one of the hardest days, when you have to do more work if your account is underperforming.

On Monday you should check your budget allocation between campaigns and the total account “budget pacing”.

What the heck is that, you might ask?

It’s just checking that you are on track to hit your target ad spend by the end of the month. Make sure your current total daily ad spend is not going to make you go over your monthly budget.

Also, if a campaign is not working well, take budget away from it (and give it to the best performers).

Simple.

It’s just like rebalancing a stock portfolio.

Another thing you should do on Mondays is adjust your bids (both automated and manual).

But you can probably guess what I’m going to say now – do NOT touch your bids if your account is performing just fine!

So, if indeed your bids need adjustments, do this:

Anything that’s working well, you can either leave it alone, or give it a higher bid (so you get more traffic, assuming you have the budget). And anything that’s under-performing, should get its bid reduced, so it gets less traffic.

I like to do bid changes in increments of 5-20%. Anything more than that could be too disruptive and through things out whack, especially these days that we use a lot of automatic bidding. Since bidding algorithms are sensitive, it’s always better to make changes gradually.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, you should check your search term reports. Add as new keywords any search terms that have converted and make sense, and add as negative keywords any search terms that are not relevant.

This one is pretty easy, and actually kind of relaxing, once you get in the flow.

Even if your account is performing well, doing this will make it work even better, so this one of the changes that you can safely do as often as you want.

Wednesday

On Wednesday, you should check any split tests (also called A/B tests) you are running, and see if it’s the right time to make any decisions – pause the losers, and write a new ad to beat the control.

This one is time-intensive and will require the best of your creativity, so be prepared.

Don’t pause tests blindly, especially if your account is not under-performing. It’s important to make sure your results are statistically significant before you make any changes – I will discuss this on a future post.

You can do this every week if you want, and not only if your account is under-performing, as long as you make sure your results are statistically significant.

Thursday

On Thursday, you should check your bids again – but only for manual bidding campaigns. Don’t mess too much with your automatic bidding (only do this once a week, preferably on Monday), and let the algorithm do its thing.

You should also change bid adjustments for locations, ad schedules (day parting) and devices. If you don’t have enough time for these additional adjustments, you can do them on Friday.

And remember, don’t touch your bids if your account doesn’t meet the two criteria for under-performance I specified on my Google Ads optimization overview post.

Friday

Friday is free-for-all day. Let your creative juices flow… here are some of the things you can do:

  • Test new campaigns
  • Test new bidding strategies
  • Test new landing pages
  • Pausing under-performing campaigns, ad groups, keywords, etc. (you can also do this on any of the other days when things are REALLY bad. This is one of the biggest levers you can pull to fix an account)

However, you need to be really careful here. You can use the “experiments” feature to test your changes with just a portion of your traffic, so that your current strategy continues to perform regardless.

You will need to use your own judgement here in terms of which changes are worth making regardless of performance, and which you should only make when you meet the two-fold criteria for underperformance I have been drilling into your head at this point.

Important Note:

While I have structured this optimization routine on specific days of the week, the changes don’t need to be done in this specific order, or on those specific days.

It is only something I use to keep my sanity.

For example, if on Monday your account has not met the criteria for under-performance (i.e it’s working well), you should only check your budget is being spent correctly (which you should do very single week regardless of performance), make any necessary changes, but not rebalance the budget or change bids (which should only be done if your account is under-performing).

But if the criteria for underperformance is first met on Tuesday, or any other day of the week, on that day you should retroactively make the changes you were supposed to make on Monday – namely, rebalancing your budget and adjusting bidding.

If it happens on Tuesday, you should also perform the Tuesday routine (search terms optimization) on that same day.

If it happens on Wednesday, you should perform the Wednesday routine (split testing) IN ADDITION to the Monday and Tuesday routine. So this would be a hard day, because you would have to perform 3 different routines.

You get the drift.

You might need to spread out the changes over multiple days, especially if you manage more than one account, or if your account is complex.

So for example if underperformance happens on a Thursday, you could perform the Monday and Tuesday routines that day, and leave the Wednesday and Thursday routines for Friday (assuming underperformance continues)

Also, try your best to perform these routines early in the morning.

That way, you will get some of their positive effect on that same day, and if you end up hitting your KPIs by the end of the day, your account is now in order (according to criteria #1, because you would have broken the bad streak of 3-days in a row bad performance rule), and the next day you won’t have to make any changes, unless it’s an unusual situation (extremely bad performance on a 30-day basis).

Hope this all makes sense, but if you have any questions, please do comment on this post!

Alright, go try out that routine, and let me know how it goes!

P.S.: If you need help with your Google Ads, go here to book a free consultation with me.

How to Optimize Your Google Ads Account Without Doing Anything

It baffles me that after 15+ years doing Google Ads, almost no one tells you exactly how to properly manage and optimize your account.

I mean, sure, there are lots of articles giving you tips and tricks, hacks and whatnot, but no one seems to tell you EXACTLY how to manage an account on a day to day basis.

I’m ending that with a series of posts.

First of all, and this is VERY important.

I learned this lesson after years of messing around in Google Ads and working much harder than I had to:

IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT.

In other words, if your account is generally performing, i.e. you are achieving your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), such as Cost Per Conversion/Cost Per Sale, Lead Volume, etc., but you have a rough day, you don’t have to do ANYTHING.

I can’t stress this enough.

A day or two of underperformance, or even a few in a row, doesn’t mean your account is in trouble.

Many times, an account will fix itself when left untouched.

There’s a lot of randomness and external factors involved in digital advertising and just like in life and love, you need to let things flow.

But how do you define REAL underperformance?

In my view, an account is underperforming if two conditions are met:

  1. It hasn’t met your KPIs for 3 days in a row
  2. It hasn’t met your KPIs when looking at the last 30 days worth of data

If both are met, it means there is a serious issue that must be corrected.

If not, let it run a while more and see if it fixes itself.

Odds are, it will.

You only make changes if BOTH conditions are met.

Credit where credit is due… I actually learned this principle from Jason Hornung’s excellent Facebook Ads training, and I saw that it makes total sense for Google Ads as well (and probably other platforms).

Next time, I will give you a general overview of what you need to do on a day by day basis, once you confirm that your account is indeed underperforming.

I have a set of changes I recommend making, and I like to do them on specific days for a more consistent account performance and work schedule.

Don’t miss that post!

P.S.: If you need help with your Google Ads, go here to book a free consultation with me.

What are the biggest travel risks in the near-term?

This a time where travel risks are front and center for travel lovers and businesses in the travel industry, and it can be difficult to decide what to do.

Check out this podcast from WorldAware and learn about this and other important topics on COVID’s impact for travelers:

Are you or your organization planning any travel in the short term?