Question 1

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:

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)
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

Low search volume

Where did you Google from (physically)?

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

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.
Still feeling uneasy? Just reach out. 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 2

How do I access search terms report for Smart Shopping?

Accepted Answer

This report can only be accessed by sending a request to Google because the terms in the report don’t accurately represent the search terms that would be good to target.

Since Smart Shopping is outbound (meaning the algorithm shows the ad to the type of people they think might be likely to buy, rather than the keywords most closely related to the product), there are usually 70 million signals to decide to target that person, and their search term is just one of them.

Question 3

Why do I need a Branded Search Campaign/Why do I need to spend money when someone is searching for my brand name?

Accepted Answer

The common thought process is “why are we allocating budget in order for an ad to appear when someone is already searching for our brand? It seems like a waste of budget.”

Here’s why:

Don’t Leave the Hot Leads Exposed to Competitors:

You don’t want to leave the brand exposed to competitor campaigns. When a lead searches for the brand name, you don’t want a competitor ad to be the first thing they see (and you especially don’t want that lead to click on the competitor ad).

Gain Extra Data For Optimization Opportunities:

Statistically it takes 2.5 clicks on average before someone is able to convert. Most people come back later. Without a branded campaign, you can see which keywords developed a conversion, but you can’t see how long it took them to convert and what path they took to come back (meaning did they Google your brand name or simply go back to your website, did they sign up for an email marketing campaign and then click on a link in an email, did they find a social media ad instead and click from there to convert, etc.).
This is because Google isn’t able to re-tie all the session data from the first interaction to the subsequent interactions.
If you set up a branded campaign, then you’re able to optimize fully because you can see which keywords have a shorter time lag, which have a heightened time decay, what is their top conversion path, etc.
Branded campaigns usually see about a 50% click-through rate and a 30% conversion rate, so they manage to catch a good chunk of the hot leads to help you see this data.
So, if you’re wondering how well the other campaigns are at driving traffic to make a return visit, you will need to raise the bid on the branded campaign.

Question 4

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.

Question 5

Is my branded campaign stealing all my traffic from organic search?

Accepted Answer

In some instances, yes.

If you have a good organic ranking and good organic traffic, branded campaigns can steal your organic traffic. The way to subvert this is to bid very low ($0.05 per click) so it's not costly.

**But, the pros far outweigh the cons: **

First, running a branded campaign protects your brands from competitors.

The first four spots on the Google search engine results page are all Google Ads listings. So, competitors who bid on your name can show as the first listing.

And because the highest you can rank organically is #5 on the page, all your organic traffic in this case would end up seeing your competitors first.

Let’s keep in mind that the #1 spot on Google has an average 20% click-through rate. So, competitors who bid on your name can be detrimental to your brand.

Suffice to say, you should always want to be #1 on Google for your brand name.

Next, running a branded campaign gives us the ability to see what keyword a user searched to get to your site (before leaving and coming back to search your brand name next).

This allows us to bid efficiently on keywords that introduce your brand to the masses, and also brings them back to the site to convert.

Question 6

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 7

Can You Join Our Company Slack Channel?  (...Or Other Communication/Project Management Channels)

Accepted Answer

We take communication seriously. And that’s why we don’t join external client communication channels or project management applications (like Slack, Ryver, Asana, Basecamp, or TeamWork).

Here’s why:

1. Juggling channels is inefficient

Each of our client managers may work with dozens of clients at a time. So you can imagine that joining every client’s Slack channel would get a bit noisy; not to mention each client uses a different platform type, which would result in a lot of clutter.

2. We have rock-solid processes inside our own agency

From onboarding to account setup to ongoing management, our communication processes are about as efficient and streamlined as it gets.

We have automations and purposely-redundant methods in place to ensure each client account is managed with the sharpest eye.

Which brings us to our final point:

3. Limited access and workflow

Each client is assigned a powerhouse team dedicated to their account: a client manager, a specialist, a backup specialist, and two strategists.

To provide the best service, client managers frequently rope a specialist or strategist into conversations with the client.

However, if a client manager joins a client's external communication channel, it is nearly impossible to rope in those other team members—and it is similarly clunky to forward client information out to the rest of the team.

With our communication systems, we can move efficiently, tie automations to our emails, and allow access to our entire team.

We prioritize frequent and meaningful communication

We try to set clear expectations early on regarding our time and yours.

While adding your client manager to your internal Slack channel might seem like the best way to reach us, our policy to stick with internal communication processes actually results in more availability to speak with you and higher-quality communication.

As always, we’re happy to chat with you about any questions or concerns. Reach out anytime.

Question 8

How can we target competitors even more? / What is a Competitive Proactive Campaign?

Accepted Answer

Pick a few competitors (suggesting 1-6) and create a display or video campaign. Setup one ad set for each competitor. Then, build these 4 audiences within each ad set:

Custom affinity targeting the competitor's website
Custom affinity targeting the competitor's brand name
Custom intent targeting the competitor's website
Custom intent targeting the competitor's brand name

This is a highly segmented way to have an outbound campaign going to specific competitor's users/customers/leads. Affinity means it will target people who are frequently visiting that brand's site or associating themselves with that brand regularly. Intent means it will target the people who are actively researching or planning a purchase of that business.

The caveat with this campaign is, if your competitor is a SAAS product, frequent visitors of the site might be going there to login. So this means the ads will appear for the competitor's existing users. Because of this, it's recommended to test this campaign to make sure you aren't spending a ton of budget targeting primarily existing users -- and, if you are, make sure the ads feature a competitive advantage in an effort to get those users to make the switch.

Question 9

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 10

Is it possible to run an e-commerce campaign but built as lead generation?

Accepted Answer

It doesn’t always make sense to setup e-commerce tracking in Google Ads.

Instead, we can just assign a static conversion value for the order form submission (average order price) and use that for tracking ROAS.