Question 1

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 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

Providing Solutions 8 with access to your Google My Business (GMB) account

Accepted Answer

Sign in here: https://www.google.com/business/
Choose the account you would like us to have access to
Choose "Users" on the left hand side
Select the "Invite new users" icon
Enter the email address you have been provided by your customer manager
Choose the role: "Manager"
Select "Invite"

Question 4

What if I have a small budget of $500 monthly?

Accepted Answer

Accounts with small budgets (~$500) can be extremely difficult to optimize because there’s often not enough data to recognize patterns.

For example, if a keyword got 1 click last month and 1 click this month, should we increase the bid for that keyword? Well, 1 click is not enough information to make an educated guess.

In this case you may need to manually edit the budget twice per month because you want to spend the majority of it in a short amount of days and then pull back.

Do not turn on monthly budget because then it will spend that money evenly throughout the month, which isn’t ideal.

Question 5

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 6

How do I use landing pages?

Accepted Answer

It used to be standard practice to create a designated landing page that would “squeeze” people into a sale because it focuses on one product, there’s no menu, no distractions, no alternate buttons, etc.

This is not recommended because on average people view 2.8 pages before converting.

So, this means a new visitor who lands on the website’s product page, might also view other products or view the homepage or the contact us page before going back to their original landing page to purchase/convert.

Question 7

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 8

How can we make use of my existing customer base? / What is "customer match" used for?

Accepted Answer

If you have a large customer list, and if your Google account is eligible for "customer match," then you can implement some cross-selling and retargeting campaigns.

Because the audience size is limited and much smaller than an audience found on Google, we won't need a large budget for this strategy.

After about a month or two of gathering conversion data, we can also create a "similar audience" based on the customer list. Similar audiences are often effective, and we will incorporate it into our proactive targeting campaigns.

Question 9

Should I run LinkedIn ads?

Accepted Answer

The Social Media Examiner says proactive LinkedIn Ads (to cold leads) are only a good fit for:

High LTV ($15k+) B2B
White collar recruiting
Higher education recruiting

With remarketing it is a whole different story, since remarketing is essentially the same as adding one more place/platform/channel to display the exact same ad that we are already running with Google remarketing (Google has a very wide reach with lots of places/platforms/channels, but they can't deliver ads on platforms they do not own/not in their ecosystem like LinkedIn or FB or Reddit).

Question 10

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.