Hibu Search – Product FAQs

Our strategy is simple. We want to spend our budget efficiently and get leads. We have data and experience that most competitors cannot match in terms of competitive advantages. We build campaigns based on core keyword lists and negative keyword lists we’ve developed and evolved in-house using years of performance data. We have campaign health checks to help ensure our campaigns are set up to succeed. And we also have our propriety scoring system to determine campaign quality which factors into optimization priority.

Our systems evaluate all campaigns daily and at or near day 30 by someone from our optimization teams. We have several methods of performance evaluation beyond automated system analysis and alerts. We routinely compare the current performance of a campaign to how that campaign performed last month. We also compare campaigns to the average results of other campaigns in that same business category with a similar budget.

Typically, it takes 2-3 months for a campaign to be dialed in and perform at its top level. Even after the first few months, we tend to see better campaign performance the longer a campaign runs.

Quality score is determined at the keyword level by Google. It’s extremely difficult to influence quality scores because it’s based on Google’s historical data for that keyword across all clients using that keyword in their campaign. Quality score holds some sway in terms of how much an advertiser will pay for a click, but because we cannot directly influence quality score, we don’t pay much attention to it, as Quality Score has very little to do with how successful a paid search campaign is.

Typically, we see much cheaper traffic utilizing this strategy. We can see traffic as much as 2-3x cheaper than other match types. With people moving to more conversational search, it makes sense to have keywords that can capture all the variations of search queries that come through. Search engines' natural language processing capabilities have come a long way, and people are utilizing that by talking to and searching with their smart connected devices. We also have extremely robust negative keyword lists that go into every campaign that help prevent clicks that are less likely to convert.

No. Currently, we do not offer Local Services Ads, and there are a few main reasons. It is very hard to scale this program since there is a verification process between Google and the client that we cannot control nor can we influence. So the build and set up for LSA’s is largely between the client and Google. The other main reason is that there is no re-seller channel offered by Google, which makes it extremely difficult for us to monetize and turn it into a profitable product.

Wrong calls are typically the product of Google showing ads for a competitor's business name. One of the best tactics to help if this is a problem is to add competitor business names as negative keywords. The other solution -- turn those competitor calls into leads.

Margins, which can fluctuate for a variety of reasons, are not something we disclose. This is a common business practice. For example, you can hire someone to mow grass, repair your car, deck, roof, etc. You decide if that investment is worth the money. Businesses don’t tell you in their estimate how much the mower costs and what their profit margin is to mow your lawn. Auto Repair is another example - you might see that labor cost is $100 per hour. Is the auto technician getting $100? No, the tech is getting x% of that, and the business is keeping the rest.

Creating your own Google campaign has a low barrier to entry but a high failure rate. A client can run a Google campaign themselves and likely fail, or they can let us, a Premier Google Partner with 15+ years of experience, run their campaign for them. For years, Google has told us that our client churn rate is much lower than they see from do-it-yourself campaigns. The whole reason Google has a reseller program is that so many SMBs have tried and failed. If it were easy, we wouldn’t have a Search product.

Another way to look at this is, what is the opportunity cost of running your own Google campaign as a business owner? What is your hourly rate, and does it make sense for you to be spending that time running Google campaigns? Or is your business more likely to grow and succeed with Hibu handling your marketing and you as a business owner working on your area of expertise?

Campaigns generally start with a split of 80/20 Google vs. Bing, but Google tends to spend more than 80%. We recalculate the budget every day, so any underspend from today is pushed back into the campaign the following day. Every day we attempt to use as much budget as we possibly can without going over budget. Bidding is largely automated except in rare situations. Human intelligence can rarely outsmart the bidding algorithm, so we typically rely on Google and Microsoft’s tools for bidding.

The search engines treat geo-targeted areas in a couple of different ways. People that are in the targeted area, people who are frequently in the targeted area, and people showing interest in the targeted area. They break these up into two forms of targeting - physical location and location of interest. They use IP address, GPS data, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Google’s cell tower location database for physical location targeting. So even though a campaign may be targeting a 10-mile radius, if someone works inside but lives outside of that 10-mile radius, they could be served an ad. Keep in mind that there are varying amounts of accuracy here depending on how many forms are used and what permissions are granted from the device. Google will also show your ads in related areas from which you think you will get quality traffic. For more information on this topic, check out this link: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2453995.

Responsive search ads are adaptive ads that utilize machine learning to test various ad assets in combinations to find the best for each situation. The ads are adapted to specific queries, device widths, and the searcher. Responsive search ads can have up to 15 (30 characters) headlines and 4 (90 characters) descriptions, giving it up to 32,760 combinations – if we use the maximum amount of headlines and descriptions. The ad itself It can show up to 3 headlines and two descriptions at any one time. The ability to test so many variations leads to stronger performing ads over time. Beginning in January 2022, we began building Hibu Search campaigns exclusively using Responsive Ads.

Impression share measures the number of searches we showed up for vs. what we were eligible to show up for. The formula is Impression Share = Impressions/Total available searches. This metric is helpful to look at to let us know what market share we are showing up for, but in many cases is not a metric that we look to optimize for. We have successful campaigns that range from 5%-90% Impression Share. Most of our campaigns are on the lower end of this due to the amount of budget we are working with that limits the amount we can bid. There are two main areas in which we can lose impression share, budget and rank.

When we lose impression share due to budget, it means that our bids are high enough to get the traffic. We just ran out of our daily budget. If we have $20 and buy candy bars for $1, we can afford 20 of them. If the store has 40, we will lose 50% of the budget. Not that we couldn’t afford the individual price, but we just don’t have any more cash.

When we lose impression share to rank, our bids are not high enough to compete in the auction for the impression we did not get. This does not mean we are not getting the traffic we need and not spending the budget, but rather spending it more on the keywords we can afford. Remember that we cannot have a higher bid than we have for a daily budget.