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Did you know that mastering the Bottom Feeding Approach doesn’t have to be complex?
To show you, we’ve interviewed a Bottom Feeding Approach expert to give you his opinion and viewpoint on how to be successful with the Bottom Feeding Approach.
From scaling to fine tuning, we hope you enjoy this deep dive.
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When it comes to the Bottom Feeding Approach, there are only a few people we turn to for amazing advice that works across the board for different goals.
Whether you’re in SaaS, eCommerce, or lead gen, you’ll be excited to learn that the recipes this expert will share will all help you hit your goals faster.
Our KlientBoost Guest:
Spencer Currie: Director of Lead Generation @ KlientBoost
Not to be confused with Steph Curry, Spencer is 6’7″, but unfortunately doesn’t play basketball. He also doesn’t play ping pong (that well) – currently 2nd in the office to Johnathan. But what he is great at is eating Chick-fil-A while watching chic flicks (he has a top 20 list that’s unbeatable).
He also enjoys blowing bubbles with his tongue while doing PPC work.
Nuggets Dropped x 36
“If you’re not trying the newest betas and strategies, you’re gonna get left behind”
The Bottom Feeding Approach
Johnathan: So this is an interesting episode because I have a really good friend who also works here. His name is Spencer Currie. He is the tallest human being at the office. We don’t know if he’s the tallest guest yet because–
Spencer: We’ll confirm.
Johnathan: Well, yeah, everybody else has just been on like the other side of their computer. And so I don’t know their height. But I’m pretty confident if I’d put my money on you, being the tallest, you might be the tallest.
Spencer: I’d be confident too.
Johnathan: If I were to put the money on the ping pong game between you and I. We don’t wanna go there–
Spencer: I love it when it comes to the second conversation. It’s like you can beat me in ping pong.
Johnathan: Yeah. I have to tell everybody too. I’m pretty proud of being–
Spencer: Very proud.
Johnathan: I guess I’m not the reigning champ unless I bring home the 2020 championship–
Spencer: You gotta beat Nick.
Johnathan: I gotta beat Nick. Frick. Okay. Anyways, everybody listening, everybody watching.
This is another installment of something that, again, KlientBoost has been really, really good at from a terminology, coining new things, new approaches, techniques, things like that.
And so we have today Spencer Currie, well your new role. What’s your new title?
Spencer: So I am director of lead generation.
Johnathan: Okay.
Spencer: So I work primarily helping B2B companies figure out not only how to get more leads but turn them into quality. Cause that seems to be the biggest issue. 
Johnathan: Yeah.
Spencer: Cause anyone can now go into digital advertising, turn on just display campaign, get a billion clicks, billion leads. And then when it actually comes to measuring MQs and SQLs they realized they had nothing. So that’s kind of the goal.
Johnathan: That’s a nice nugget you just gave there.
So my joke that he so rudely interrupted me with was saying that he’s a human flounder, which is a fish that’s on the bottom of the ocean. And because today we’re gonna be talking about something called the Bottom Feeding Approach. Or bottom feeder approach? Bottom Feeding Approach.
Okay. So like I brambled on earlier, this is something where we figured out something that works really well. We don’t know if anybody else is doing it. So we just gave it a random name.
We had the bloom technique before. I don’t even know if you knew that name. That’s a new thing that just came with, with Matt and Graham and Tiff. Now we have the Bottom Feeding Approach. We have single keyword ad groups, we have the breadcrumb technique, you know, all those kinds of things.
The Bottom Feeding Approach. What is that?
Spencer: Yeah. So I think going back to how it kind of all came about was the problem was we were working with a lot of companies who they were kind of maxing out what they could get. They found out like if they’re using us or whoever that their CPO is as low as they could get it and the conversions were as high as they could get it or leads rather. 
And so now we’re tasked with, okay, they have funding, they have whatever, they can scale X amount, how do we get that extra volume while not sacrificing on quality. And so one big thing that we started doing was adding audience layers at the observation level for the technical Google Ads a little tidbit–
Johnathan: Explain that. Explain what that means.
Spencer: So if you don’t have audiences on your campaigns, it’s an observation mode. It doesn’t affect any of your traffic. Yes, you can put bid adjustments on those audiences, but it doesn’t affect the current bidding if you have it at 0%.
So we add audience layers to all of our campaigns and all we’re trying to do is understand how do these audiences, when they’re searching for the keywords, target the campaigns.
How do they interact, what are their micro metrics on Google analytics, tell me everything about that audience and how they interact with our keywords and our campaigns. And so we’re finding that there’s just weird correlations even if you don’t think that audience is relevant to your business.
I mean random things were converting and looking really good. And so I was thinking of full broad keywords. Typically on Google, they don’t convert well, the quality is trash and so we don’t even touch them.
Johnathan: Right.
Spencer: But my thought was, well what if from an understanding from our current search campaigns that have a certain amount of audiences that are converting really well, if we were to extract those audiences, add them to a campaign where we’re just targeting full broad keywords and make those audiences what we call targeting.
So instead of observations or targeting mode. Which means your ad will only show when they’re searching for that full broad keyword, but they also fit in that audience.
Johnathan: Got it.
Spencer: So it’s an additional layer of–
Johnathan: I have a great. If you don’t mind my artistic ability to explain this. So consider a Venn diagram, right? You have two circles that are encompassing each other in the targeting mode of audiences. There’s two modes, there’s observation and there’s targeting.
The targeting basically requires that a person has to type in that keyword or the search term that triggers that keyword and be part of that audience to see the ad. In observation mode, like you mentioned earlier, you’re just adding them to your campaigns.
And so Google is gonna tell you can have, I don’t know, is there a limit to—
Spencer: Well there is a limit but for most campaigns.
Johnathan: For now it’s infinite, but you can add an infinite amount of audiences to your current campaigns that are like your bread and butter and just see what Google tells you if they were typing in that keyword and part of that audience.
So it will give you the statistics, like Spencer said, the micro metrics at each audience layer. And then from there you basically figure out which audience is good to then add to the broad match campaigns. And that’s where you then switched it to targeting.
Spencer: Exactly. Yeah. So that’s the goal is, if our hypothesis is that all full broad keywords are trash and not gonna be quality, well what if we could challenge that with adding an additional layer of what I would say the only other qualifier we can make is an audience layer in Google search.
And so it was finding out how do we combine those two things together. Because once, if we’re able to then extract those high converting audiences and make them work with full broad keywords, we’ve just opened up a mass new market of keywords that we can mine for-
That we would have originally not deemed quality or even gone after with our current set of keywords in our campaigns. But now we’re actually opening ourselves to.
Johnathan: So is the reason for the name, the Bottom Feeding Approach, is that because like you take bait, you throw it in the ocean and all that exact match phrase, match modified broad match, they’re eating as much as they can of that bait before it drops to the bottom floor.
Spencer: Exactly. So the full broad should just be like if theoretically in a perfect world you have all of the quality words that you can think of and that you’ve been working on to build over the last year, five years, 10 years.
Where at full broad with this audience layer is now giving you exactly that. Everything that you haven’t gotten to eat up yet. It’s somehow still trickling through your net. You’re now the flounder that’s eating everything–
Johnathan: The bottom feeding. That’s the only fish we could think of that is on the bottom of the floor. Have you seen that the volume of the broad match plus the audience in targeting mode has more volume than the other campaigns all combined?
Spencer: Yeah.
Johnathan: Really? Wow.
Spencer: Absolutely I’ve seen that. And it’s funny because there’s an infinite amount of synonyms and the way people are–
Johnathan: I love cinnamon.
Spencer: Synonyms.
Johnathan: Got it.
Spencer: People are typing in that I would have never thought of or that even in like a SpyFu that no compared to targeting that are just out there and they’re super long tail and they’re one impression one click type of searches, that there’s an infinite amount. Exactly.
Where we’re only going after things that we know when we’re pulling things into SKAGs. We have filters for like at least five impressions and two clicks. Well, there’s tons of more searches out there that are completely random that will probably never happen again, but are relevant to our business that we’re just not targeting.
Johnathan: Yeah.
Spencer: And so that’s where opening our net up a little bit. And again, letting the bait trickle down to eat up at the bottom has been very effective for us.
Johnathan: What do you think is cause we mentioned SKAGs, people might not know about the single keyword ad groups. Something that we definitely didn’t coin but definitely made more popular with our content and how we, I think we’re select number one, on Google organic for it.
We even changed that structure up. We actually haven’t come out with it yet. What do you think like–
Spencer: Stay tuned.
Johnathan: Yeah, stay tuned. What do you think is the future of the Bottom Feeding Approach?
Spencer: So full transparency.
Johnathan: Oh wait a second.
Spencer: Yeah, this is gonna get real.
Johnathan: Hold on, I’m going to hit all three at the same time. It better be a big nugget you are about to drop. Is it?
Spencer: Well, I’m just gonna say–
Johnathan: No wait wait don’t say it yet. But is it gonna be good?
Spencer: Yeah.
Johnathan: Okay. One second. Okay. All three, now go.
Spencer: I’m gonna say no more audiences.
Johnathan: Just broad?
Spencer: Just broad.
Johnathan: Okay, why?
Spencer: Because of Google’s algorithmic bidding, their automated bidding strategies. They’re getting better and they’re getting smarter.
Johnathan: Nice.
Spencer: As of right now, I would not suggest anyone do it as their new method or a way to start a campaign or if you’re an agency taking over a campaign.
Johnathan: Yeah.
Spencer: But for accounts that are in decent health and have a high amount of conversion volume and can afford a 30 day to 60 day learning period, it is getting smarter.
Johnathan: So if people were to take some tactical nuggets, no pun intended. From this, would you say that if they were gonna go full broad, no audiences, What kind of bidding strategy?
Spencer: Target CPA.
Johnathan: Target CPA.
Spencer: And I would suggest that only if your account has at least a hundred conversions in the last 30 days.
Johnathan: Okay. Account wide.
Spencer: Account wide. If you don’t have that, then just think of that ammo in your chamber. If you’re giving to Google to shoot and find as many conversions as possible. If you have a hundred. You’re basically shooting blanks. So it’s just too hard.
Johnathan: I dunno if I understand that analogy, but it sounds cool. Wait so–
Spencer: Do you like guns?
Johnathan: No – I guess – let’s talk about? No, just kidding.
So my understanding too is like what percentage, let’s say that somebody is spending, just easy math, $100 a day, and they are getting a hundred conversions a month, what percentage of that would you give from like a research and development aspect to that full broad campaign?
Spencer: Yeah. So with anything like that. That’s a completely new initiative. You don’t know how it’s going to react. I always stay around 15 to 20%. Maybe even less depending on how, if you’re an agency, how strict your client is with budget.
Or if you’re your own business and you wanna be careful, I’m anywhere between a 10 and 20% range. Just to start off because there’s no problem in starting slow, gathering the initial results, and saying, well it’s actually working really well. It’s beyond our other campaigns. Let’s do this up to 50, let’s say it’s up to 70. You know eventually–
Johnathan: I guess depending on who’s listening, whether you are the advertiser yourself and you’re listening to this and you are, you have a pretty tolerant threshold for risk, you can go up higher in that percentage and you learn faster I assume. Would you say so?
Spencer: Yeah.
Johnathan: But if you’re not, and like you’re really risk averse, go low. But I feel like there should always be some portion of like R and D for any advertisements out there that’s doing anything.
Spencer: 100%. If you’re not trying the newest betas or the newest strategies, then you’re gonna get left behind.
Johnathan: Then are you really living?
Spencer: Exactly.
Johnathan: Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t think you are. Okay cool. This is super rad.
Spencer: Yeah.
Johnathan: Anything that I didn’t ask you about, anything that you think is valuable for people to know?
Spencer: I mean, just to clear things up because I feel like I refuted myself in saying there are audiences when this whole thing is on the Bottom Feeding Approach. I just wanna say, the Bottom Feeding Approach for advertisers today, I think is the safer way to start that process.
Because again, you know that those audiences, once they’ve been added to your other campaigns and you’ve gathered all that data, you understand, okay, these audiences are really quality audiences for our product or service. So there really is no harm in adding this to the targeting level for your new full broad campaign just to start slow.
But for anyone who’s listening who has a big budget and I was looking for things to test and take to the next level, going full broad, no audiences and automated bidding strategy, is gonna be the future.
Johnathan: Is that 2.O?
Spencer: It’s 2.O.
Johnathan: A little too soon to talk about right now. But we’ll come out with another episode.
Spencer, Mr flounder, six seven, second place in the office in ping pong. Thank you for being here. I don’t know if you caught that roast. Okay, good. I always just wanna see a giggle. We’ll have you back.
Spencer: Yeah Of course.
Johnathan: Sounds good. Take care guys!