Transcription
Google ads has changed so much over the past few years that we've had to completely rethink best practices and adjust our strategy. Fortunately, we work with more than a thousand clients a year, so we have tons of opportunity to test and work out what's working best right now. In this video, I'm going to share my updated strategy for how you should approach Google ads.
Okay, so in this video, I'm going to start at the beginning and make strategic recommendations as if you're brand new; haven't run Google ad campaigns before. To start with, don't worry if you have run Google ad campaigns; you have more experience; you have conversions within your ad account. I'll then make strategic recommendations for what you should do in that scenario, because the way you approach Google ad strategy does want to change depending on if you are just getting started or if you've got more experience and more data within your ad account. So let's start with those people that are getting started, new to Google ads, perhaps haven't run a campaign, or have, but they've just sort of dabbled so far.
So there's a few strategic recommendations that I make; I'm going to run through these. The first is to start with a relatively small budget. I've seen a lot of businesses jump into Google ads and say they have a $2,000 total budget; they think, right, I'm going to start with $100 a day. That only gives you 20 days of budget. Now the problem is that when you first start running ads on Google, just like when you first start anything, you are likely to not be that good at it yet. You don't have the experience; you don't know what you don't know; you don't know how to make the adjustments to get the results that you need. There is a learning curve, and if you only give yourself 20 days runway, there's a decent chance that you won't have worked it out by the time you reach day 20. Now if you watch my videos and go through my content and have a better understanding than the average beginner Google Advertiser, you've got a greater chance of being able to make it make it work, but I would rather a business in that sort of scenario start with a smaller daily budget and spread it out over a longer time period to give themselves more time to work it out; to work out exactly what offers they can use for their business, which keywords deliver the best results, all that sort of stuff.
Okay, now I say start with a small budget; I'm not going to give a specific money number recommendation, because it really depends on your specific circumstances. For some businesses, $10 a day would be a really decent sized budget; for others, there's no point they running Google ads unless they're spending thousands a day because of the size of the business. Right, businesses obviously vary from solopreneur just getting started all the way up to massive many thousand-people organizations. Right, so what I'd recommend is that start with a budget that is small enough that if you lose it, it's not going to put you or your business in any sort of financial difficulty, but it also wants to be large enough so that you do care; it doesn't want to be so small where you just sort of set it up, forget about it, never go back and check it. There's normally a sweet spot where you're like, we could lose this, but we don't want to, and that's probably the best place to stop. Then once you get it to work well, you can always then look to scale after that.
I'd also recommend that as a Google ads beginner you start with search campaigns and ignore the other types of campaigns for the most part for now. And the reason why is because search campaigns are the easiest to understand as a beginner. When people think about Google ads, they naturally think of search; you think, I go into Google, I search for something, and then ads pop up that are relevant to my searches; that's what Google ads is. Now those of you that are more experienced know that Google ads is that, but it's a whole host of other things as well. We've got shopping; we've got display; we've got ads on YouTube; we've got all sorts of other places that you can put um Google ads, but that's sort of the the obvious thing, the easiest to understand; I think the best place to start. Now if you want more information about how to set one of those up, I'll include links in the description below; one to a video on how to do keyword research to find keywords that you want to target as part of a search campaign, and another one that's a full beginners tutorial that shows you how to create a search campaign from scratch, walk you through the entire process. If you're beginner, go ahead and watch that video.
Now when you are starting with search campaigns, one of the recommendations I would make when you do so now, and this is something that's changed from what we used to do a while ago because Google ads as a platform is updated, is to use the bidding strategy where you maximize for conversions or maximize for conversion value as opposed to maximizing for clicks. Now what that means, if you set your campaign up that way, Google is going to try and get you as many conversions, so as many leads, as many sales, depending on the campaign um objective you use, as you can get, or maximize conversion value. So let's say you're an e-commerce business and you're sending people through to your store, where you can set up your campaigns to say to Google, not only do I want you to get me as many sales as possible, I actually want you to prioritize the customers that are likely to spend more with me; maximize conversion value. Now we didn't used to recommend that because we felt that with newer ad accounts, Google wasn't sophisticated enough as a platform to be able to work out who to put your ads in front of initially when there wasn't much conversion data within your ad account. So we used to go for maximizing clicks, but now I feel, we've done a lot of testing on this, that actually Google is smart enough to be able to optimize for conversions, to be able to optimize for conversion value from day one, because Google can use all sorts of other metrics before you start generating lots of leads, lots of sales, to be able to work that out. So they can see who's spending more time on your website; they can see based on a user's other activity around the internet, where obviously Google's able to track all sorts of things that they do, that think, okay, yeah, based on the data, the massive data that we have around this individual, we think that would match really well with this business, likely to generate um conversions. And we've tested this; we've tested maximizing clicks versus maximizing conversions in particular, and maximizing conversions even with new ad accounts now works better; so a strategic shift that we've made relatively recently into something different from what we used to do a few years ago.
Okay, another strategic recommendation I recommend for relatively new Google advertisers is to start with one offer. So even if you sell lots of different products, lots of different services, I think it makes sense to focus in on the one offer, the one service, the one product, or perhaps the one product range that sells the best. Now if you have this data, because let's say you've run um ads or you've sold products elsewhere and you know, okay, yeah, these are our best sellers, great, go ahead and start with those. If you don't have that data, you might be able to make a guess based on what you know about the market. If you're a new business but you have experience of the marketplace, you think, well, these are likely to be our best sellers, and then go with those. If you have no information around that whatsoever, I'd recommend going and trying to sell your highest margin offers, because the more profit you make from selling a product, the easier it's going to be to make it profitable to advertise that. You know, simple math will tell you that that you know you are able to spend more to acquire a customer through an ad campaign if that customer is then worth more to you. And I think that's important because if you go ahead and try and advertise lots of different things at once, it's easy to sort of get lost in the detail and lose focus. And in reality, for most businesses, even say e-commerce stores that sell tons of different things—and we'll talk about better campaign setups to leverage um sales for for e-commerce business later on—but there's still likely to be a small number of products, and this definitely applies to services, that are your best sellers. And sometimes that can differ between new customers and repeat customers. So you might see that for acquiring new customers, this thing that we offer converts really well; we're going to put most of our budget for acquiring new customers behind this. And maybe when it comes to remarketing, getting people to buy again or through email marketing or whatever it is you're doing to reactivate existing customers, maybe then you're looking to push other products or or you're going to rely on people upselling themselves and adding to other things to basket and all that sort of stuff. But it's common for even big businesses, so much of their new customer acquisition to be based around a few offers. So I think focusing on that to begin with, being able to really concentrate on that, get to know that as a Google Advertiser, understand, okay, these keywords work really well, these ones it feels like they should but they don't; we're going to focus more of our targeting, I think is a a good way to go early on. And if you focus on your higher margin, more expensive potentially products and services, then because it's easier for that to be profitable, you're more likely to get your Google ad campaigns to work in the beginning; that's going to give you more budget to then be able to spend elsewhere and expand to other products and services once you're ready.
Okay, so we're going to move on to what you should do strategically if you've got a more established Google ad account; you've got some conversion data. In a second, before I do, I just want to quickly let you know about our done-for-you Google ad services. So my company can create, manage, and optimize your Google ad campaigns for you. We can take all that workload off your hands; we'll almost certainly get you significantly better results than if you continue to manage it yourself, because we do this all the time; we've worked with thousands and thousands of clients when it comes to Google ads; we've spent tens of millions on the platform. So if that sounds interesting, go ahead and click on the link in the description below; that'll through to a page on our website where you can book in a free, no-obligation call with one of my team members to find out more about how we might be able to help. So if that sounds interesting, go ahead and do that, and uh hopefully we get a chance to work together.
Okay, so we ran through some strategic recommendations if you're relatively new to Google ads and how would you approach various things. I now want to talk about a shift that I would recommend you make once you've got some more experience and once you've got some more conversion data within your Google ad account. So I've got here that ideally you would have at least 100 conversions. Now those conversions might be leads; those conversions might be sales; might be purchases; it might be something different depending on what type of business you have. But once you've got at least 100, ideally more, and you've had a bit of time in the platform, you sort of feel like you understand what's going on, the various components, what they do; you don't have to be an expert level by any means, but just sort of, you know, you're not going in there thinking, what on Earth is this Google ad account thing and how do I do anything; you you've gotten past that stage. I think at that stage it's a really good time to create a Performance Max campaign; so a different campaign type to add into the mix.
Now just to explain Performance Maxs and what they are and and why I think they're really beneficial; firstly, nearly all businesses can use Performance Max campaigns, and Performance Max campaigns tailor really well to individual businesses, which is why so many businesses can use them, because they take the elements of Google ads that are likely to work for a business and focus on those. And its base level, Performance Max is all the different types of Google ad campaign rolled into one. So within a Performance Max, you've got search; you've got Google Shopping; you've got display; you've got the Discover based stuff; you've got YouTube; you've got all sorts of various elements Google ads. Now obviously different businesses are going to see better results with different networks within the Google ads world, depending on what type of business they are. Right, so e-commerce business might see great results with shopping ads, whereas a high-end service-based business, something coaching based for example, might see better results with videos on on YouTube being used as ads. Right, so Performance Max is going to be able to narrow, zero in on that and be like, okay, for this business we're going to use a combination of this, this, and this, and we think that's going to produce the best possible results. If nothing else, with a Performance Max, when you expand from a search campaign and you create a Performance Max campaign, even if it's mostly search focused, still the people that you're advertising to mostly on the search network, that's the traffic you're bringing through to your website, with Performance Max you get the advantage of being able to then remarket to the people that have clicked through from search ads, perhaps through display or or YouTube or elsewhere. Right, and that alone is significant; really easy way to get some remarketing added in, and that should not be underestimated, because we know nowadays that single touch points when it comes to generating conversions are often not enough; being able to remarket, put ads in front of people again, remind them, get them to take action because they originally clicked on a search ad, come through your website, and then they were distracted—'cause the doorbell went or they're waiting in queue and they had to move or whatever—being able to remarket, put ads in front of people again, helps you get people over the line.
Okay, so I don't particularly like advertisers starting with a Performance Max campaign from scratch, and there and there's a few reasons for that that that I want to run through. Performance Max campaigns perform better when they have conversion data; so that's why I talked about, you know, once you get past 100 or so conversions, great time to look to add it in, because Google is taking over a lot of the heavy lifting from you as an advertiser with the Performance Max campaign; they're working out so many things for you; yes, you still have inputs, but they're working out so many things for you; well, well Google is better able to work that out if you have data within the account and they know, okay, this type of person converts; they're more likely to convert if they have this many ad impressions; they're more likely to convert this time of the day; all those various touch points. Right, the other thing is that Performance Max campaigns are more complicated to create than search campaigns. If you think about it, you're creating a campaign where ads could be put on search; could be put on display; could be put on shopping; could be put on YouTube; well, these ads could look very different; there's different requirements for each one of these. So from an SEO standpoint, it is more difficult. Now I will include a link in the description below to another video that shows you how to create a Performance Max campaign from scratch and run through the various options. So if you're interested in doing this, I would recommend you check that out, 'cause that's likely to be um really quite um could be quite complicated for people who are first moving away from say a search campaign, moving towards a a Performance Max.
Now I have run into the scenario a few times where, well, a number of times actually, where people are going doing exactly what I'm recommending here, so they've started out with search; they're moving to Performance Max, and it just doesn't work. And when I've sort of dug into that, trying to work out, okay, well, why didn't this work, 'cause that rarely is the case when we do that for clients; nearly always works; Performance Max campaign nearly always produces an improvement in results; it's because their creative assets just aren't good enough. And particularly if you're used to Google search where you're just writing text and then you're moving over to Performance Max and you've got all these other networks within Google and now you've got to create high-quality imagery, you've got to create high-quality video; that's a completely different skill set and one that a lot of Google advertisers just don't have. So particularly for people that perhaps are running their Google ads for their own small business, I would often recommend that is not a skill set you need to develop yourself; maybe it is; you might work as a Google Advertiser; you're going to need to know this stuff; there are various job roles and and different people watch my videos. Right, but for a lot of say business owners that have loads of other things to do, they've created a search campaign; now they're moving on to Performance Max; maybe they jumped on Canva and created a few quick images, but they don't look great. In that scenario, just hire people to create the creative assets, the images and the videos for you; they need to look good. And you're thinking, well, I don't have the budget to do that, then stick with search until you do have the budget to be able to do; you don't want to go and switch over to Performance Max if what you're then putting in front of people, imagery, videos, is not good; it's just simply not going to work. However, if you have the capacity to produce high-quality imagery, high-quality video, then Performance Max can work really well. And like I said, even if it's just retargeting the people that have interacted with you on search, then that makes a big difference. And I am actually planning to create more videos on producing creative assets, images specifically for Google ads, so go ahead and subscribe, and you'll be able to see those hopefully coming out relatively soon.
And no matter which Google ad strategy you use, reducing your cost per click as much as possible is really important. I share my favorite techniques for doing just that in this video here. It's really easy to get lost in the weeds and the detail of Google ads, but at the end of the day, if you pay less per click, you'll have more profitable Google ad campaigns. So go ahead and give this a watch.