Google Ads is the largest search media platform to drive traffic and increase conversions. But did you know it’s also the most complicated one and the hardest to learn? From Search & Shopping, to Display, YouTube and more, there are numerous products that you can count on to help you grow your business.
In our experience auditing accounts, brands spend the most budget on Google chasing traffic that was already headed to their website anyway – branded search campaigns. Most of the spend towards these campaigns are wasted.
Step 1. Could Google be
a Fit for Your Brand?
When it comes to Google’s online advertising platform, we often look for two things in the brands we work with.
- Is your business a niche business that has a
substantial amount of search volume? - Is your product unique with a clear differentiator among your competitors? As an example, this could be as fundamental as a pair of shoes—yet one with a rare color combination that sets it apart from the competition.
Businesses that fit this mold are in the perfect position for us to quickly dominate the search marketplace.
Step 2. Brand Deep Dive
So, you have a niche product and you want advertising with Google. Consisting of products like Google Search, Google Shopping, YouTube Ads and Google Display, where do you even start? That’s where we come in. At Evestar, our experts kick off every partnership with an initial audit to gather a comprehensive understanding of your business, the competitive landscape, target audience and more.
If your brand has brand awareness…
When working with a new client with an established presence, we can immediately build from the bottom-up. We’ll begin by focusing on Google Search & Shopping as the primary channel to drive immediate ROI, maximizing value from the existing brand image. This allows us to generate immediate revenue in order to “reinvest” the profit into higher funnel campaigns.
This was just the case with a wholesale client of ours in the fashion segment. Prior to working with us, they established strong partnerships with retailers such as Nordstrom, Bloomingdales and Neimen Marcus. While these partnerships helped garner large search volumes for the brand’s name, it was the retailers who captured and monetized the search volumes, and not the client. To direct traffic to the actual brand rather than the retailers selling it, we transferred ownership within search and shopping which immediately increased revenue and ROI for our client.
Instead of the high search volumes benefiting their partners (retailers, affiliates, etc.), we shifted the campaign parameters to benefit the actual brand.
Can We Expand Google Shopping?
Is your brand’s product visually appealing? Do you have a competitive advantage that would entice users to click on your product (e.g. price, professional photography, etc.)?
All of these factors determine whether Google Shopping –the top Google ecommerce platform — will become your main focus in your Google Adwords campaigns. Google Shopping is almost always the most profitable Google channel for e-commerce businesses.
Initially, we’ll dive into the search terms for a deeper understanding of what potential customers are actually looking for within search results. Then we look thoroughly through each product’s titles and descriptions to make sure the most searched keywords are included in the titles and descriptions.
While this is time consuming and requires tremendous experience and precision, it’s the vital jumping off point for everything moving forward. Once we’ve completed this review, we’re ready to optimize the shopping feeds including product titles, descriptions, etc. In addition, we’ll build out a new campaign structure that ensures we’ll show up for the right terms AND remove any waste.
The unique nature of Google Shopping, which doesn’t give the ability to bid on exact keywords, is what makes it very different from Google Search. This is also an area where Evestar’s unique approach becomes increasingly valuable. Everything from data feed optimization, campaign architecture, as well as a close connection with SEO are critical to the long-term success of Google Shopping campaigns.
Is YouTube the Right Platform for you?
For businesses with strong video creative, YouTube can be a great channel to drive cost-effective traffic. The ability to place video ads on prominent channels or by interest groups (or both) is one of the most powerful targeting tools available.
We often see very cost-effective reach from YouTube towards a high-relevance audience.
YouTube has many unique targeting capabilities which makes it a logical partner for Facebook Advertising. While Facebook’s algorithm is extremely powerful in identifying target audiences, YouTube uses tools such as previous search history to expand reach to our target audiences.
Should You Allocate Spend Towards Google Display?
Have you maxed out potential across social channels? Do you have an appetite for expanding your top-of-funnel awareness? If so, then Google Display may be a good fit.
This is one of the most misunderstood channels within the Google suite of products. While Google Display is an older network to advertise on, the wide reach of placing banner ads across millions of websites has always been a powerful way to reach users.
In almost every instance, businesses come to us utilizing small display budgets for remarketing only. However, we have seen many occasions where this is exactly the tool that a business needs to take the next step in expanding their digital presence.
IF we can find enough budget to make this channel work, there is huge potential profitability with Google display.
Step 3. Architectural Audit
Once we understand how Google’s different ad options should work together, it’s time to dive deeper into your brand audit.
Virtually all of Google Ad’s products and channels consist of far more moving pieces than other online advertising channels. In order to achieve long-term success and brand growth, it’s vital for us to dive deep into the campaigns, focusing on where and when they should be segmented, and ensuring that the overall account structure is precise.
- Do we have appropriate control over targeting?
- Are we using the correct structure in building campaigns?
- Is the account correctly segmented (brand vs. non-brand, by network, etc.)
- Is there proper emphasis on the small details which maximize success?
A strong audit won’t focus on subjective details such as why certain ad copy should be favored. Rather, it should be focused around best practices, diving deep into structural findings that will absolutely improve performance. A strong audit will focus on:
- Building out keywords granularly
- Ensuring demographics aren’t under-performing
- Making sure negative keywords are being applied and no “waste” is creeping into the account
When conducting an audit, you can count on our experts to review 100+ individual details that ensure the account is set up for maximum success.
Step 4. Account Restructure
Most brands approach us with accounts that need to be almost entirely rebuilt, beginning with the fundamental campaign types before slowly moving outward.
Our rebuild process consists of the following steps:
- Review all of the basic pieces of the account, including Negative Keyword and Exclusion Lists, Conversion Tracking, Attribution Models, Audiences, etc.
- Rebuild any Smart Shopping campaigns into standard campaigns. Our testing continues to prove our standard shopping campaigns are far more effective for account growth than Smart shopping campaigns (Google proprietary shopping campaigns). If Smart shopping is currently being utilized within an account, our first step will be to rebuild those campaigns into standard campaigns that are capable of growth.
- Rebuild/Restructure Brand search campaigns to ensure maximum value.
- Rebuild/Restructure Non-Brand and Competitor search campaigns.
- Layer Display and Remarketing campaigns (or rebuild) into the account.
- Review and adjust any other Display or YouTube campaigns that exist in the account.
Unlike Facebook, Google gives us the opportunity to optimize campaigns as we see fit. This means that once our Google Media Buying team restructures a campaign, we’re immediately ready to capture any relevant data needed to optimize our bids and keywords, and reach a profitable campaign structure.
Remember: you have the control to successfully advertise on Google… but its not until you understand ‘how’ to control it that you’ll really start to drive profits.
Step 5. Leveraging a Holistic Approach
Once you’ve set up the structure, developed new creative and optimized the website UX/CRO, your environment is ready for testing and scaling. Depending on the previous account spend, a strong initial testing phase generally lands between $5,000 – $10,000 per month. Throughout testing, a credible Facebook Advertising Agency should achieve solid benchmark metrics in CAC/AOV/Conversion rate in order for the test to be successful. It’s only once metrics are solid that your team should increase budgets. Scaling campaigns requires precision and creativity which is why experienced campaign managers understand how quickly you can sensibly scale the budget and when the time is right to swap out creative.
