If you’re looking for an agency to run your Google ads, but want to know how they’d approach your campaigns, you’re in the right place.
For us, it’s important that we’re 100% transparent about how we approach our Google Ad campaigns. So in this article, I’m going to walk you through step-by-step how we approach our client ad campaigns. Plus, I’ll share a real-life example of how we brought a client’s cost per conversion down by 77%!
What Is The Offer?
The first thing we look at before we approach a Google ad campaign is the offer.
What are we offering to the customer? Is it a small product? Is it a service? We want to know what we’re offering and whether it will work.
We want to ensure that we have a good, proven offer and something people want. We want to run ads with a good track record that are proven to work, this helps us to dictate what the strategy will look like.
Is Google The Appropriate Channel?
Google can work for any business!
If you’re a plumber, your customers are probably not coming over to your site after scrolling on Facebook, they’ve most likely Googled you for quickness and effectiveness. Google also offers Google Local Ads especially for effectively promoting physical stores along with their locations. These ads can show up on Google Maps, as image ads on websites that are part of Google Display Network, along with Google Search results, and under YouTube videos, and they show the exact location of the business.
We do extensive research into your business and industry to find where is the best place to put your ads. If Google’s not your thing, we have exceptional expertise in Facebook Ads!
Let’s Talk About Google & AI
The first thing to understand about Google is that it considers itself an AI-first company. So, running Google ads is effectively training an AI. The quality of an AI comes down to the quality of the training data you give it.
If you want to teach Google Ads how to get clients for you, you have to train it effectively, so it learns to recognise customers and use all the data it has access to optimise your campaigns. When training an AI you need to start with very simple instructions, then as it becomes more autonomous over time, you can delegate more and more control.
Google has an immense amount of data about the users’ habits in browsing, searching, and using Google’s properties like YouTube. Facebook’s AI cannot rely on these.
However, Google needs to rely on more guesswork when it comes to people’s interests because people don’t reveal these entirely by their browsing habits. Remember that one time you bought a pair of ballet shoes for your niece, well now Google thinks that you are a ballet dancer. Yet, in Facebook’s case, people voluntarily give out everything about themselves and reinforce the data by their group and event habits.
So the question is, how do you teach an AI? How do you build your campaigns in such a way that you teach Google how to recognise customers?
Training Google With Good Customers
We want to train our AI by using good quality customers, but who are these customers? First of all, let’s split our customers into these four categories:
- Brand customers: People who are already your customers, or know about you.
- People searching for your products online: People who are searching for the exact products or services you provide. For example, if you install solar panels, this would be customers searching for solar panels/ solar panel price/ solar panel quote.
- People that are trying to solve a problem that you solve: For example, how do I stop my toilet from leaking?
- People that could be your customers but aren’t actively looking at the moment or even know who you are.
If we’re going to start teaching the AI how to recognise good customers, we’ll start by creating brand campaigns for that first group of customers we talked about.
Brand Campaigns
Firstly, we’ll get your brand campaigns nailed down! A brand campaign is a campaign targeted at people that are already searching for your company by name. This is your most valuable audience, the centre of the bullseye. These people are already looking for you and are the most likely to buy. By using your best audience, we can prove best-performing campaigns! This will improve your account’s quality score overall.
Google Ad Tracking & Data
After we nail your brand campaigns, we want to get all your tracking and conversion data working properly. This is important in terms of training the AI to understand your customers.
Data points relative to your website behaviour or app behaviour relate to people becoming customers. This includes people calling you, interacting with your business page, filling out forms, making purchases etc.
We get all of this solid and nailed down so we have the best quality traffic – your brand traffic.
This also limits exposure while you’re building out the campaigns. You’re not wasting money unnecessarily. You’re training the system with good customers and how good customers behave.
Focus On The Customer
Now that we have our campaign for those brand customers who already know us, the next step then is to build campaigns for the other customer types mentioned earlier.
Search Customers
These are the people actively searching for your product or service and are the ‘workhorses’ of your campaign. There will be more customers in this category than in your brand category.
They’ll probably convert at a slightly less conversion rate, which means we’ll need to focus on optimising later in the process via ad copy variants, landing pages etc.
Solving A Problem
Now we begin to build things like lead magnets and email sequences to convert people that are in the market for your product or service but not actively in the buying mode right now.
Again, this gives us the foundations and the muscles to be able to then start building systems which generate warm audiences or engaged users, from people that are not yet your customers.
Potential Customers
For your potential customers who don’t who you are yet, we start looking at display campaigns. This includes YouTube, banner ads on websites and even in-app advertising.
This audience is massive, so your campaign has to be huge too; this is why we do those last. We want to build your audiences and your tracking effectively first, so by the time we get to these massive audiences in the Google Display universe, the AI already knows how to recognise customers. We’ve taught it with data!
Discovery ads are another type of campaign that reach people who are more open when they are browsing, or are beginning to actively search. Discovery ads can help reach up to 3 billion customers across Google feeds and usually convert better than other ads.
Optimise
Once the campaigns are live, we can begin the Optimise phase. Essentially, we are taking the initial results of the campaign and bringing them down to a point where we are within our target metrics. This phase has no set time, we are constantly optimising.
After a campaign goes live, our goal is to gain some form of consistency in results. We don’t want big spikes in sales some days and none on others because we can’t learn from that. We need consistency that gives us data to work with.
Once we achieve this steadiness, we can work on the campaign to try and drive down the cost per acquisition and cost per lead to the target that was originally set. We will continue optimising until we get to that target.
We are constantly optimising campaigns by rolling out new copies, new images, new audiences, new hooks, new angles and campaign types.
When you work with us, you’re in the best hands. We know what works and what doesn’t.
Now that we’ve told you all about our approach to Google Ads, it’s time to see how we put that into practice. Let’s look at our work with JournoLink!
Case Study- PR Service and Software
Around mid-January last year, we were approached by a PR service and software agency that specialises in small businesses. Our client had found the leads they were receiving were too expensive and not qualified enough. This meant they weren’t able to scale and grow the business as fast as they wanted to.
Our Approach
Firstly, we did an in-depth audit for our client to see why they were spending so much money with no effective results. We found that they had far too many campaigns running, so we totally restructured their campaigns.
We trimmed everything down and optimised their campaigns through keyword optimisation and strategical testing. We did this to bring down and maintain the new cost per conversion.
Results
We had huge success bringing down our client’s cost per conversion!
Originally, our client was spending around £45-£50, we got their cost per conversion down to £30 almost immediately. After that, we were able to bring the cost down to £15 and then all the way down to £10- that’s a 77% decrease in cost per conversion.
Wrapping Up…
So that is how we approach Google ads and how we helped one of our clients decrease their cost per conversion
At Yatter, we have a lot of experience with a lot of different clients in different industries and our team of experts who help manage your Google Ads and always get great results.
Simply put, we know what works when it comes to Google. Click here to book a complimentary consultation.
