Question 1

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 2

When should I consider using Remarketing?

Accepted Answer

Hold off on remarketing in the beginning to test the quality of the traffic in the campaigns, and if a campaign isn’t performing well then you don’t want to limit the ad spend by pushing customers back.

Question 3

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.

Question 4

Why is the conversion rate higher when leads come from paid ads vs. organic?

Accepted Answer

The paid campaigns are always going to bring in higher quality website traffic than organic search results because:

Ads have headlines and descriptions - vast amounts of them - that have been optimized for click-through-rate by us and by the algorithms.
Organic searchers aren't always going to be sent the correct page. When someone does a search on Google and finds your website in the results, they might not get to the landing page/homepage. They might end up on a blog post, etc. In fact, you can see what percentage of the website visitors enter your site from the landing page/homepage by going into analytics.google.com, clicking on Aquisition, then Search Console, then Landing Pages on the menu on the left.
You're also getting a higher percentage of people who are motivated to buy. Many people are looking for information and will end up on an article on your site. The people who do click on an ad are looking to explore your brand/product/service from the perspective of someone who is considering pulling out their wallet.

Conversion rates from paid ads tend to be 6 times higher than conversion rates from organic searches.

Question 5

How Do My Google Ads Affect My Other Channels?

Accepted Answer

Other marketing channels will likely experience increased conv. rate & other positive indicators when you run & grow a Google Ad account.

This happens because of several reasons... As the Google Ads account grows:

It's able to increase conversion rate in other PPC channels as well as direct traffic because of the awareness-building that occurs from remarketing campaigns, outbound campaigns, brand campaigns, and just being present in search & shopping. (Remarketing especially is a seriously underrated ninja campaign because it follows people around the internet & reminds them to come back & buy, but there's no way to track it's impact. To know that it's working the only thing we can see is performance boosted on other channels. Try turning it off for a month or two and you will see it's impact.)
It's able to increase conversion rate of direct traffic because much of that traffic interacted with an ad at some point (after all, that's how they found the website). So the website's "direct" traffic has been warmed up by ad interactions & then the tracking was dropped (for a myriad of reasons) which causes them to be labeled as "direct."
It's able to find cold, brand new leads by competing for the competitive, expensive placements & clicks with standard shopping (a powerful workhorse to win bids & gain clicks from users who know nothing about you but who happen to be shopping at the time) and also outbound display/video (brand-building to cold, unknown users who have relevant interests). These cold users have a super low conversion rate because they often don't buy on that first click. And then tracking often gets dropped later when they finally do buy.
When those cold users do finally buy, FB will try to say it was their ads who got the sale, because FB includes "1-day view-throughs" in their conversions in order to pump their numbers. So FB will just remarket the crap out of all the cold leads Google found and then claim the sale even if there was never a click on a FB ad. It's insane.
And it's also likely that Analytics & Shopify will say those folks were "direct" because those platforms are not focused on using deep tracking that can trace back to the first ad click (since they are just website tracker tools that rely mostly on UTM parameters only). And the first click could have happened days or weeks before, often on a different device, different browser profile, etc.
Those first time cold leads that were finally converted turn into returning customers, boosting email performance, direct traffic numbers, and conv. rates even higher.

The channels work together holistically.

Question 6

How often do you make changes to a campaign?

Accepted Answer

A very high spending account may need daily or even hourly changes. For accounts with smaller budgets, there may not be as much maintenance involved.

Similarly, this depends on if we’re achieving our goals or not. If we are, we may make slower optimizations (to not deter the performance of the campaign). If we aren’t hitting our goals, we make more frequent optimizations until we start achieving them.

On average, we generally make changes in an account every 3-7 days (again, depending on how much activity the campaign gets and your specific goals).

Too many changes harbors an ecosystem where it’s hard to keep track of the outcomes; making changes too infrequently means competitors may outperform your campaign.

Question 7

How often do we meet to review the campaigns?

Accepted Answer

This report is not proprietary and is easily reconcilable within your Google Ads account (which you retain full ownership of).

After you receive the report, we offer a meeting to review all activities in your campaigns, what happened over the last month, what is happening now, and what our plans are for future growth.

Question 8

How long will it take to build my campaigns?

Accepted Answer

10-12 business days.

Question 9

Can we spend more money on a specific product or in a specific location?

Accepted Answer

Begin with $50 per day (or an amount that makes sense to you). Try to split the Smart Shopping campaigns to two different geographical locations, then allocate the ad spend to each campaign based on performance.

So two identical smart shopping campaigns.

1: All of (ex: Country), excluding (ex: State)

Whatever ends up being limited by budget, or having the best ROAS, gets the most ad spend.

Since they both will have their own dedicated daily budget, you will want to balance that on how each of the campaigns performs.

Question 10

Why are we selective before excluding a product from shopping ads?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes when the budget is limited, having too many products in the shopping ads means the algorithm has trouble gathering conversion patterns, which can lead to low performance.

It becomes harder to optimize because each conversion on each shopping ad or product is too spread out across the weeks or months.

So the answer is to temporarily exclude products until the algorithm can get the hang of things. Then, with scale later on, those products' shopping ads can be re-included.

While it's nice to hone in on products that work, we are very selective about excluding products just because of low performance. Here’s what usually happens when we exclude products.

When we turn off a product ad that might have been getting lots of web traffic (spending the budget), people start to look at related products, see remarketing ads for those products, and end up buying them.

It seems like the product that was getting all the clicks was losing money but it was actually acting like a highly targeted TOFU (Top of the Funnel) ad to bring traffic to the site & feed the product ads which seem like they're performing well.

(Quick note: TOFU or Top of the Funnel is a marketing strategy we use to attract cold audiences and increase brand awareness. Learn more about TOFU here.)

So, if we exclude a product, it can cause a domino effect where another product stops performing, and then we exclude that one, which causes another, etc. etc."

Does excluding my product mean it won’t be purchased?

Just because we exclude a product, doesn't mean it won't be purchased. It just means it might not work well as a shopping ad & the money could be better spent on other shopping ads to bring people to the site...but those people still might buy these products.