Question 1

Should I share budget between multiple campaigns?

Accepted Answer

Shared budgets are not ideal but they can be useful - In the beginning of a campaign launch, you might decide to put campaigns into a shared budget in order to help determine how to divide up the budget. You will be able to let the algorithm decide what to show based on how much demand (impressions) there is.

Question 2

Should I use search with my e-commerce business?

Accepted Answer

Shopping campaigns are way more effective than Search campaigns when you’re targeting a wide audience. This is because search campaigns require search terms to run whereas shopping campaigns use Google’s 70 million signals to determine whether to show the product to someone. The former is inbound and the latter is outbound.

However, always build both Search and Shopping campaigns for your eComm companies, because:

Shopping Ads and Text Ads (from Search) have different formats and they do appear in different placements/properties throughout Google network
Being different, there are instances when both shopping and text ads can appear at the same time. This increased exposure is beneficial.
In most cases, shopping ads do perform better but this is no guarantee so you also need to, at least, test search ads.
There are accounts where the reach for the shopping ads is not sufficient to spend the monthly budget. Thus, you need to supplement shopping with search.
Aside the above reasons, presenting a setup with search and shopping ads (and explaining the differences and the performance projections for each ad format) is better than the alternative (not having Search ads and wondering "why not").

Question 3

What are Cart Abandonment Campaigns and Cart Abandonment Audiences?

Accepted Answer

If you see significantly more product value being added to the cart than what is being purchased, consider adding a Cart Abandonment Audience to a Remarketing Campaign to try to get those hot leads back.

Use Display Ads so that any other websites they visit, like competitor sites, they will see your ad saying, “Finish your checkout and you’ll get 10% off with coupon code x”.

(***Make sure to only add new audiences to the Remarketing Campaign after the campaign has proven that the ROAS is there or else you will simply be putting budget & effort into something that converts at a negative net profit.)

Question 4

What are conversion action triggers?

Accepted Answer

Conversion Actions - To be able to track a conversion, we would need a "trigger" for that conversion action.

A trigger can be one of the following:

A thank you page that only loads after a successful submission/optin.
A code that runs after a successful submission/optin.
A unique event that is only executed upon a successful submission/optin. For example, CTM sends a "Calls" event once a phone number is dialed.

Question 5

What are Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) Campaigns? When should I use DSA?

Accepted Answer

DSA Campaigns are used as learning experiments - You may choose to build dynamic search ad campaigns because they help you learn what ad copy & keywords to use in the other campaigns, in case you missed any important and effective words. Adding new words to the other campaigns can be helpful to optimize -- and it can be especially helpful if you’re hitting a spend ceiling and would like to raise the budget. It’s a way to identify, rather than guess, which keywords to target.

When to use - These campaigns are 100% created by the algorithm based on the words used in the landing page -- the algorithm decides what ad text and what keywords to use. These are only good for websites that are extremely specific and have content centered on a set of keywords.

How to use - Give the campaign a small budget. These campaigns have the ability to spend a lot of money very quickly, and DSA campaigns usually have a lower conversion rate than other types of campaigns, so it’s okay to let it be in the “limited by budget” status.

Optimize - When you’re ready to see it’s results, go to the DSA campaign and click on Search Terms. Sort by impressions to see which terms have a high amount of search volume. From there, find the ones that are actually getting clicks. Use those terms in the other campaigns.

Question 6

What are my resources as a Solutions 8 client?

Accepted Answer

When you become a Solutions 8 client, you are assigned an entire marketing department team for less than the cost of a part-time employee.

Your team is made up of:

A dedicated client manager
Specialist and backup specialist
Strategist

Question 7

What are some high-level recommended campaign bidding strategies?

Accepted Answer

Bid Strategies

Step 1:Non-Shopping Campaigns: Start with manual CPC with eCPC enabled (because eCPC is the option that uses a bit of Google’s automation, but is mostly manual). This is nice because you can control the bids, but it’s not very scalable because it’s high maintenance, and because a machine will do it better than a human ever could. After you have around 100 conversions with high frequency (like a sale every other day, for example), at this point we’ve given the algorithm enough data for it to pick up where we left off and make it better. Now you can switch from eCPC to a smart bidding strategy like Target CPC. It leverages the data that you’ve already provided.

Shopping Campaignss: Start with a regular Shopping campaign before switching to a Smart Shopping campaign, because regular Shopping campaigns are inbound (meaning people are searching for the product when the ad appears) whereas Smart Shopping is outbound (meaning Google will try to show it to the type of people who might be interested), so the Smart algorithm can’t do outbound well, and therefore will never prove ROAS, without plenty of data. So, start with Shopping campaign using Manual CPC (usually w/enhanced enabled unless you have super low profit margin and you're trying to prove concept)

After 35 - 45 days of gathering consistent conversion data (aka converting at a normal cadence with a reliable pattern), then pause all shopping campaigns & replace it with a new Smart Shopping campaign using Maximize Conversions (which is the only bidding option). After 35 - 45 more days if the campaign isn’t hitting an acceptable ROAS, you can turn on the optional ROAS goal within the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy.

You don’t want to start off with a ROAS goal because it won’t get any conversions because it doesn’t have enough outbound data yet. Once you've given it that data, turning on the ROAS goal will restrict it to only spend when it thinks it can hit that goal, so spend starts to decrease, the campaign gets less activity, you get less clicks per day, but you should get a higher quality click and conversions that are making your ROAS.

One additional strategy is to spend more $/budget to force Smart Shopping campaigns to go find new markets by removing the Target ROAS goal.

Step 2:

Step 3: Now that your ROAS is high, you can begin to give it more daily ad spend to see if you can increase the amount of conversions. So now, instead of spending $100/day and getting $300, you can try spending $500/day and getting $1500. Just make sure the ROAS doesn’t dip.

Display Pay Per Conversion - This is a new type of campaign/bid strategy in which you only pay for a conversion, and it’s only when the conversion doesn’t go above what you said you would pay. Begin with a super high CPA and then decrease it slowly. The idea is to get the CPA as low as possible (at which point you'll just turn off any regular Proactive Display campaign and just use this one). These types of campaigns can get lots of fake conversions generated by bots. Captcha prevents the bots from submitting forms and wasting ad spend.

Question 8

What Budget Do You Recommend I Start With?

Accepted Answer

There's no "right answer" to the question "what budget should I start with?" but here's what you need to know to make an educated decision.

Too High Can Be Bad

If you have a brand new ad account and/or a sales & marketing funnel that has not yet been thoroughly tested & honed, then exorbitant ad spend can put you at risk of overspending in areas that don't provide good results.

In the beginning, nothing has been tested just yet:

The algorithm doesn't know which combinations of ad copy, users, search terms, placements, etc. will work best
The ad management experts don't know which settings and campaigns and division of the budget will work best
The business owner doesn't know which parts of the website or call-to-action or lead magnets or emails will work best

If your budget is "too high" then it might outpace the manpower that's needed for iterations (i.e. marketing experts to edit the website, edit the sales pitch to match the new, cold leads from paid ads, fine-tune the settings in the ad account or the CRM email follow-up, catching & negating an irrelevant keyword, etc). It also might outpace the rate at which the algorithm can gather conversion data points to learn from (meaning the user interactions for the sales cycle to complete & the algorithm to observe what worked). It's impossible to know at what point this phenomenon will happen or even if it's happening, but this section is here to explain why we recommend starting with a somewhat conservative budget if it's a brand new ad account.

However, if you've run some ads recently (less than 30-90 days ago depending on how long your sales cycle is) then the algorithm has some data to work with, and if your website and other marketing assets have been tested & perfected then you are many steps ahead and can afford to be less conservative with your starting budget.

Too Low Can Be Bad

When a campaign doesn’t have enough ad budget to show the ad enough, it can have a compounding negative effect on campaigns.

More money = more opportunity for the algorithm to bid at the right time, the right place, and make sure to get the "easy" sale that it's been following for a while.

Here's a rough example: let's say a user interacts with one of your ads, and the algorithm sees them do it again a few days later... If it's out of budget that day, it might not have the opportunity to bid on that user's second search. A competitor's campaign that still has budget might scoop up this lead that was already invested in & "warmed up" by your ad a few days ago.

Budget limitations can also be detrimental to your return on ad spend, because the amount that you're able to spend per click will affect how far up on the page you’ll be. Higher up on the page means higher conversin rates since those users tend to be more eager to buy.

Another issue with low budgets is simply the lenght of time it takes to get through the "learning phase." Less money means fewer conversions and fewer conversions means fewer data points with which to optimize from. So, if it takes many months to get the hang of things, the business can run out of income in the meantime.

Then there's another compounding affect there, which is that more time exposes you to more shifts in the market. If the algorithm is watching a pocket of the market and trying to hone in on what works and then the weather changes...well, it's going to make it even more difficult & slower for the algorithm to decipher what worked well & when & why because you have that "market shift" factor pulling the rug out from it during the learning.

This is why we recommend raising the budget slowly & consistently in the first few months in order to find that perfect starting budget. Many times we discover a threshold where the return on ad spend begins to suddenly improves after a small budget bump.

Every Industry Has A Different Range Of "Ideal Min. Budgets"

What's your average CPA (Cost Per Aquisition)? If you sell consumer goods and your AOV (Average Order Value) is $60, then your CPA might be $20, for example. Whereas if you sell services and your LCV (Lifetime Customer Value) is $5,000, then your CPA might be $400, for example.

In one industry the algorithm only has to spend about $20 to get it's first conversion data point and in another industry the algorithm has to spend about $400 to get it's first conversion data point.

So, if both of these example companies start with a budget of $1000/month then the consumer good company will get about 50 conversions in the first 30 days and the services company will get 2 conversions in the same time period.

With only 2 conversion data points per month (and maybe only 1 in the first few months since it hasn't undergone any learning period yet), it's going to take the algorithm a long time to optimize itself towards what works (meaning which users convert, which search terms, which placements, which ad copy combinations, etc.)

So if your CPA is large, you will need to deal with larger ad budgets, even in the beginning, just to get things going fast enough before the business runs out of income.

Can You Give Me A Ballpark?

Sure.

If you have a brand new account & are working with low CPAs (like in the examples in the previous section), then we recommend choose a budget between $2000 - $5000 to start with depending on how patient you are to get through the learning/optimization phase & see results (lower budget means slower to learn/optimize but less money waste in the process and higher budget means quicker to learn/optimize but more money wasted in the process).

If you have a brand new account & are working with high CPAs (like in the examples in the previous section), then we recommend choose a budget between $5000 - $10000 to start with depending on how patient you are to get through the learning phase & see results (lower budget means slower to learn/optimize but less money waste in the process and higher budget means quicker to learn/optimize but more money wasted in the process).

If you have an account that has a good amount of recent conversion history, then we recommend starting with a budget that's the same (or a bit higher) than you were spending previously.

Whatever number you choose to begin with, we recommend raising the budget slowly & consistently in the first few months in order to find that perfect starting budget. Many times we discover a threshold where the return on ad spend suddenly improves after a small budget bump.

Question 9

What Can I Afford To Pay For A Lead From Paid Ads?

Accepted Answer

If you’ve been using Google Ads or other paid advertising platforms to generate leads, you probably noticed that among all of them, Google tends to have the highest cost per lead (CPL).

Why?

Because the conversion rates of those leads are usually higher. Google understands the intention of its users and uses their algorithm to actively seek out users who have shown an interest in your product—those who are ready to buy.

According to Unbounce, “50% of people arriving at a retailers site from paid ads are more likely to buy than those who came from an organic link.” Click-throughs from PPC results convert 1.5 times more than organic search results (Atomic Reach). Meaning, in terms of getting higher bottom-funnel conversions, PPC beats SEO.

To make sure you have a well-optimized PPC campaign that generates revenue, it’s crucial to gather conversion data first. Sure, it might take some time. But it’s one of the most important elements in building high-performing campaigns that give you a huge return for every dollar you spend in advertising.

Question 10

What do you recommend for a new product launch?

Accepted Answer

If you are launching a new product, there are a few things we can do to get it out into the ad ecosystem.

First of all, if you add the product to your eCommerce store, then it will automatically be added to the Smart Shopping campaign through the product feed after a few days. However, depending on how large your store is, it could take the algorithm quite some time to give the new product ad spend and gather conversion data on it. If you want to speed that process up, we can give the product it's own campaign(s) to force the account to devote ad spend to it more quickly.

We can give it it's own budget and run the following campaigns:

Shopping (eventually the product will be switched over to the main Smart Shopping campaign once we are done with the "push")
GSP and Display - These work especially well with remarketing audiences of recent website visitors
YouTube - Do you have a video to promote the product? If so, we can try YouTube shopping to get eyes on it.
Search - Temporarily running a search campaign on a new product can help the ad account gather conversion data more quickly because it allows the algorithm to see what the ideal, target customer looks like.