Question 1

When can I submit information about special offers we have?

Accepted Answer

It's best to let us know about 72 hours in advance.

For lead generation, it's very simple to update ad copy; but, for eCommerce, any special offers have to be approved by Google Merchant Center before they can be used. And approval typically takes about 2-3 days.

Question 2

How do I advertise holidays and promotions?

Accepted Answer

**Holidays & Promotions**

**Promotions** 
If you are offering a temporary discount, you might ask how it should be included in the ads. Consider the three options below:
1. Temporarily change all ad copy to include mention of the promotion. 
2. Simply swap out the landing page URL but keep the ad copy the same. 
3. Run a promotions-focused campaign (which is described in the holiday campaigns section below).

**Holiday Campaigns**  
You might try to boost sales surrounding a specific holiday, depending on whether your product is a good fit and whether you have the ability to put together a holiday-specific landing page.

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).
A Search Campaign is NOT recommended (because people searching for “valentines day gifts” won’t cost effectively click on this product-specific inbound ad, AND it will be expensive to bid on these keywords to be shown. You can read more about this in the “**eCommerce Search vs. Shopping Campaigns**” FAQ.) If you have a campaign set up or are being asked to set one up then strangle it (limit the budget severely) to keep it from bringing down the ROAS of your account too much.

Question 3

How long should we stay in the experimenting & learning phase with our Google Ads account?

Accepted Answer

The experimenting and learning will slow down a bit after 90 days, but never stop making changes to the campaign. With live bidding, you often won’t use automated bidding strategies because they won’t optimize performance. For example, if you tell it to automatically focus on getting the maximum amount of conversions, then it will set the bids in order to get the most amount of conversions, which favors cheaper, less quality traffic because it’s not focused on the quality of those conversions. You could potentially set a goal for the automation to target a specific cost per click, but you don’t have enough activity to use that feature because you would need to have a conversion or two every single day for it to have enough data to form patterns. So, use Manual CPC with enhanced CPC enabled, which means you set the bid based on what you think the keyword should be worth to you, how many clicks per day, and if there are conversions for that campaign. You could probably not touch a campaign for a month and it would likely perform relatively systematically, but as new competition comes in, old competition falls out, people increase bids or increase their budget, you need to hop back in there and make those adjustments.

Question 4

How do campaigns affect my overall account?

Accepted Answer

This is a useful perspective that will help as you learn about the various algorithms working with or against each other. Campaigns have their own history (some have gathered accurate data with patterns and some haven’t had the opportunity), they have unique competitive environments they’re working in, and they are going after different markets (some have an easily identifiable niche audience while others are working with vague audiences). As you get to know the campaigns, this will shape how you treat it. Here’s a 1 minute video explaining this:https://youtu.be/3UIqObOLEeg

Question 5

How do I set up UTM Tracking?

Accepted Answer

This means you want to manually store data in your CRM platform which tells you where the contact record originated from.

In order to do this, you will have to set up hidden fields on your landing page, and you will select which words (aka parameters) to store (i.e. “source=google” and “campaign=branded”).

Once you determine those parameters, you (or your vendor) will enter into the appropriate campaigns or ad groups.

You can double check that the UTM settings are set up correctly by clicking on "ADS & EXTENSIONS", then click and "EDIT" on an ad and then click “TEST.”

Intro to UTM parameters training here: [https://youtu.be/RIL3HPA_Ddg]

Keep in mind: These UTM parameters aren't quite as good as Google at tracking folks with accuracy. It's simply a piece of text that's temporarily stored in the person' browser cache when they visit the site. If they come back to the site again with new parameters sent, then the browser's cache will be overwritten with the new parameters. If they come back to the site on a different device to convert, then the browser won't push the parameters into Shopify. If they delete their cache & cookies between their first site visit and the site visit that they convert on, then Shopify also wouldn't be able to include the parameters with the sale.

Google, on the other hand, is much better at tracking folks across devices and through any accidental cache deletions or overwritings. Google has people logged in on their phones, etc. etc.

But the UTM parameters should be close enough to accurate to get a quick gauge on what percentage of traffic is coming from where! You can also compare this data with your Google Analytics account in the Source/Medium section.

Question 6

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 7

What to Expect With Competitor Campaigns

Accepted Answer

Competitor Campaigns:
* These campaigns tend to have a shorter sales cycle.
* They are also known to drive more branded search (because someone shopping a competitor’s site, might come back to Google after not finding what they were looking for, remember your name, and type that in).
* Don’t expect to have a high quality score on campaigns like this because the content on the site will never have the keyword (the competitor brand) in it.
* It is almost always a trademark violation to put your competitor’s business name into your ad copy.
* If you do not have a direct/obvious competitor, some nuance needs to be taken into consideration: 
	* For example, you might want to target a big brand who steals most of your business, but since the big brand sells more than just the products that you sell, you will need to target keywords that include both the competitor’s name and the product. 
	* Sometimes this is the case with smaller competitors, as well, in which case try both strategies (target just the competitor’s name and also the competitor + product as keywords).

Question 8

I Googled a keyphrase for my campaign but I don’t see my ad—why?

Accepted Answer

A: Ultimately, the answer depends on your unique campaign—but there could be a few potential reasons for this:

**You are in a competitive industry and/or have a limited budget**:
In this scenario, there are two options for bidding:

1. You can bid to be at the top of the page (in which case you may spend your entire budget on one click per day)
2. You can opt for more selective bidding, resulting in more leads

Setting a lower budget allows only the right people to find you, instead of paying a lot of money to claw to the top of the page.

**You have other keyphrases that have proven to convert**
After running a campaign for some time, data shows us which keywords perform the best. If an ad doesn’t appear for a specific keyphrase, chances are it hasn’t converted as well as others—and more money is spent on those proven successful keyphrases instead.

**Low search volume**
Sometimes, a keyword has low search volume altogether. In this case, ads are ineligible to be shown until search traffic increases.

**Where did you Google from (physically)**?
It could also be a regional issue. If you’re out of town—where your ads are turned off—they won’t appear from a Google search.

**From here, you have a couple options to get to the bottom of why you aren’t seeing your ads:**

1. Check out the “Ad Preview Diagnosis” tool in Google Ads. If an ad isn’t showing, this should tell you why—or, it may tell you that your ad is, in fact, showing up in Google search results, but you just haven’t seen it yet. 
2. Still feeling uneasy? [Just reach out](https://sol8.com/contact/). We can give you the reason why you aren’t seeing your ad; but chances are, there is a strategy behind it—and we’re happy to go over it with you.

Question 9

How do I grow/scale quickly?

Accepted Answer

Trying to Scale/Grow Quickly - [Training Video Here](https://youtu.be/1sgBk50qHZA)

Sometimes the ROAS will plateau, so you need to take a risk and apply more budget into the smart shopping campaign, turning off the “Target Roas goal” (this is an optional goal that lives inside the bidding strategy of “Maximize conversion value” inside of Smart Shopping Campaigns) temporarily in order to see if we can force the algorithm to “tap into” new audiences.

Question 10

How do we change the image on our remarketing campaign?

Accepted Answer

The easiest way to do this -- and the way that will give us the best reach -- is to add text-free images. This way, you can use responsive display which shows the text below or to the side of the image. You can use a 1:1 and also a 19:1 aspect ratio.

How can we help?

Onboarding

Strategies

General FAQs

Tutorials