Q: How do I advertise holidays and promotions?

Holidays & Promotions Promotions Temporarily change all ad copy to include mention of the promotion. Simply swap out the landing page URL but keep the ad copy the same. Run a promotions-focused campaign (which is described in the holiday campaigns section below). Holiday Campaigns Here is a recommended strategy example surrounding Valentines Day with a $15k spend on holiday-specific ads: Spend $3k three weeks prior to V-Day & then spend the remaining $12k during the last two weeks. Swap out the landing page used in the Branded Campaign to the holiday-specific page temporarily so that anyone familiar with the brand can learn about the limited-time products. Set up a new Smart Shopping Campaign for the holiday-specific products. (If the products are new, then start with a regular Shopping Campaign in order to build conversion data first and then switch to Smart Shopping. See the Bidding Strategies FAQs for more on this.) Set up a new Display Campaign for holiday-specific products. Do not set up a new Search Campaign targeting V-Day Gift search terms (not product specific).

Question 1

What does "Proven ROAS" mean?

Accepted Answer

A campaign that has proven ROAS means that it’s ROAS is or was at whatever number you need it to be at in order to make a profit.

For example, a 100% ROAS means you spend $1 on ads and get $1 back.

This is never a large enough number because the business will undoubtedly have other expenses beyond just ad spend, so this campaign has not proven it’s ROAS.

400% ROAS is a general rule of thumb for the minimum number you should be aiming for if the business doesn’t know it’s exact costs & you therefore can’t calculate an exact ROAS metric.

This is because 400% lets you break even if the business has a 25% profit margin. You get to make at least 4x your money back to break even. If you want to cover an agency fee, then they’ll have to get to 450% ish.

Find current ROAS: All conversion value / cost

Find minimum, break-even ROAS: If 60% profit margin, figure out how many times 60% goes into 100% (60/100 = 1.7). Then, add two zeros to turn that into a percent and you get 160% break-even ROAS.

***Pro tip: If you are an e-commerce company, set up a custom column in Google Ads to display ROAS in a % format (fyi, if you don’t set this column up, you can look at “conversion value/cost” column which gives you the same ROAS number but in decimal format).

Question 2

What impact does running PPC ads have on my brand?

Accepted Answer

Brand Recognition is a by-product of running advertising - Companies that run PPC ads consistently receive more organic, more post ad click calls, & more direct traffic as a result. In fact, Google even takes some data from PPC ads and factors it into Organic rankings (like time spent on page, click through rates, etc.) This is anecdotal, but there is always a correlation when you look at the amount of money spent on ads and compare that with organic traffic to the site. Take this into consideration when you are calculating the impact running PPC ads has on your business.

Question 3

What is the best ad copy strategy to use for search campaigns?

Accepted Answer

The recommended approach for best ad copy strategy is to use 2 Expanded Text Ads & 1 Responsive Search Ad.

Every search campaign’s ad group has these 3 ads inside it.

The expanded text ads give a structured ecosystem to try out the two sets of headlines/descriptions you think will work the best, and then use the RSA ad to give you insights into which ad copy is most effective.

Effective copy can be a better click rate (which helps with the quality score) or a better conversion rate.

After there have been 100 clicks on the ads, then you can begin making changes to optimize the expanded text ads based on those insights.

Question 4

What if a campaign is not spending all of the budget?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes businesses would rather gain more impression share than hit a super high goal because the goal might be more profit than they really need and they want volume/scale.

For example, if you are targeting ROAS, then the campaign prioritizes that ROAS over spending all the budget, which means you’ve reached audience capacity and your options are either:

Find a new/wider audience with different keywords
Lower the bid strategy goal

Question 5

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 6

How do I decide whether a campaign can spend more even when it doesn’t say “limited by budget”?

Accepted Answer

If you have extra ad spend to work with (or if you pause another campaign and need to allocate its budget), check out the impression share (IS) lost to see if an existing campaign can take on the new spend. If (IS) is lost due to budget OR due to rank, then it most likely can. This is due to the cyclical nature of bids:

Rank determines your ad’s position in the results.
Rank is affected by bid.
Bid is set based on what the business can afford (for example, [Max CPC] = [Break Even CPL] * [Conversion Rate]).
Higher Bid = Higher Ad Position = Better Website Visitors = Higher Conversion Rate (clicks to leads) = A Higher Bid can be afforded. So, you can sometimes raise the bid in the anticipation that the conversion rate will increase by guesstimating what it will increase to and “putting the cart before the horse.”
If NOT Smart Shopping campaign - you might temporarily switch the campaign to a manual CPC (with enhanced CPC enabled) bidding strategy if it was using an automated bidding strategy before, because the algorithm most likely isn’t intelligent enough to push the max bid in this way.
If Smart Shopping - it’s not possible to switch to manual, so here are some other options:
- Give it more budget in order to get it to increase the bid
- Before increasing the budget, make sure the product feed is optimized by including a lot of optional information that helps with rank. Be sure to optimize your feed during the eCommerce setup process.

Question 7

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 8

How do you track leads who call my business?

Accepted Answer

Most agencies will count a call that lasts 45 seconds or longer, for example, as a conversion. But we try to minimize false leads by hiring a designated team to listens to the calls that come in from an ad and give it a score. This also gives us the added bonus of helping us to uncover any issues that might be negatively affecting conversion rates during the calls (like an automatded answering machine that is confusing people, for example, or low quality leads who are asking for something different than what your business sells, etc.).

We use a platform called Call Tracking Metrics to help us record incoming calls and determine which were true leads.

What Is Call Tracking Metrics (CTM), and Why Do You Absolutely Need It?

Record, measure and listen to the calls your advertising efforts generate in real time! All phone call data is seamlessly linked to your Google Analytics, making it easy to define your exact ROI from your ad campaigns.

Here's how it works:

We generate a tracking number that will magically appear on your website instead of your real number only when someone has recently clicked on an ad. We generate another tracking number that will appear on the mobile ads as an ad extension, and ad leads will click on this number directly from the ad on their phone and their phone will dial the number, which will, of course, redirect them to your real number.
When either of these scenarios happen, someone from your business answers the phone and engages the prospect in conversation. The call will be recorded. We have a call rater who listens to every call, determines whether the person who made the call is an actual lead who is expressing interest in your product/service, and then rates it as a lead or not.
We are also able to see some very useful information about each call:

What page of your website the individual was on when they called
What keyword they used to land on your website
Which campaign generated that user
whether users were experiencing a challenge when attempting to place an order. So, that is a great QA check.

After that, we will import any of the leads who made the call from the website into Google Ads to attribute the conversion back to the day the person interacted with the ad(s).
If the call was made from the ad extension on the mobile ad, then it will be automatically counted as a lead only if the call lasted 30 seconds or longer. Google does this automatically because there is no functionality to import them (since they made a call directly, there is no tracking ID number, which is called a GCLID).

Here's the most important piece: After we listen to the conversation to access whether or not the lead was good or not, we go into your Google AdWords account and score the lead. This gives Google a lot of great data to work with.

If the lead was of poor quality, Google will limit the amount of times the ad gets shown to the same type of person.
If the lead was great, Google will show your ads to similar people who fit that leads profile.

End result? You get more conversions for a better cost.

***Please note that we pay for your Call Tracking Membership when we manage your advertising campaigns. The only cost to you is the monthly cost per number (In the US it is usually $1.50/number) and the cost per minute, which is usually less than $0.05 per minute.

Here is a screenshot of all the information you can receive about where exactly a call was coming from.

**Testing Your Magic Number*Once you or your vendor has setup the magic number on your website, you can test it to make sure it's working. Here's how: Open an incognito window and go to: [place URL here]/?gclid=test (i.e. yourwebsite.com/?gclid=test). You should see the magic number instead of the real number.

Question 9

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 10

How do I advertise holidays and promotions?

Accepted Answer

Holidays & Promotions

Promotions

Temporarily change all ad copy to include mention of the promotion.
Simply swap out the landing page URL but keep the ad copy the same.
Run a promotions-focused campaign (which is described in the holiday campaigns section below).

Holiday Campaigns

Here is a recommended strategy example surrounding Valentines Day with a $15k spend on holiday-specific ads:

Spend $3k three weeks prior to V-Day & then spend the remaining $12k during the last two weeks.
Swap out the landing page used in the Branded Campaign to the holiday-specific page temporarily so that anyone familiar with the brand can learn about the limited-time products.
Set up a new Smart Shopping Campaign for the holiday-specific products. (If the products are new, then start with a regular Shopping Campaign in order to build conversion data first and then switch to Smart Shopping. See the Bidding Strategies FAQs for more on this.)
Set up a new Display Campaign for holiday-specific products.
Do not set up a new Search Campaign targeting V-Day Gift search terms (not product specific).