How GOOGLE ADS Works in 2024

Google ads has changed a lot recently meaning that a lot of the old PPC strategies that marketers are clinging onto from the olden days aren't so useful today and trust me I've been running Google ads since 2008. so I know what the olden days look like so here are some of the biggest changes and how your business can get the most out of Google ads in the next 12 months the current state of Google ads all right let's talk about performance Max or pmax as we fondly call it feelings in the marketing Community are divided but at exposure ninja we've seen some great results with it with a couple of caveats that I'll come back to in a minute we've had ad campaigns get almost 1300 return on ad spend using performance Max yes 1300 Ross responsive search ads and dynamic search ads can also be great tools so we're going to talk about them in a bit as well all right so you probably know performance Max but if you don't it's a goal-based AI driven advertising type that you can use in Google ads to basically get access to all of Google's ad inventory across things like display video search Gmail and even Maps but the goal for us marketers of pmax is that we can find new potential customers across all of these different ad inventories at different stages of the funnel and Google's AI can optimize our campaigns to basically get more of the conversions that we want now pmax uses AI across bidding budget optimization audience targeting creative attributions and more depending on your ad objective which is usually conversions and it uses your creative assets like copy imagery audience signals and other data feeds to put your ads in front of potential customers us hopefully at the right time and the dream is that someone who's at the bottom of the funnel who's ready to convert is going to see the appropriate ad to drive that conversion and what's great about pmax is that the same campaigns can Target visitors at the middle and the bottom of the funnel so you've got the same campaign building awareness and driving sales adapting the right message to the right person of course for you as a marketer this means that you can focus your budget in one campaign rather than trying to spread it thinly across different campaigns targeting different stages of the funnel now a couple of caveats here firstly performance Max campaigns like any automated campaign takes a while to find its fee it's looking at the data that's coming from the performance of these different ads so you need to give it enough budget and enough time for it to collect enough data to be able to optimize at exposure ninja we don't typically run that many ad campaigns below say 3K spend per month most of them much higher than this and it's important that you are putting enough budget into your campaigns to give performance Max the day data it needs to be able to optimize if you're just giving performance Max relatively small budget and a very small time window it's just not going to have enough insight to work out what the best combinations of ads audience targeting and placement are going to be to get you the results that you need we'd also suggest not giving performance Max too much of an audience signal this is where you give the tool some indication of the audience that you want to start off with targeting now it can feel intuitive to try and give a very specific audience signal but actually we found that performance tends to be better when we're fairly broad with the audience that we allow performance Max to choose from of course if you're seeing loads of irrelevant Impressions or low quality conversions then you might want to go and refine that audience a little bit more a couple more caveats firstly because performance Max is optimizing for conversions it's really important that you've got conversion tracking set up properly worst thing possible will be having all of performance Max optimizing for conversions that actually don't have any business value to you whatsoever that's not really any so make sure you've got conversion tracking set up and if possible really deep conversion tracking including things like offline conversion tracking so that you're giving it as much data possible about the types of visitors that are turning into good customers for you it's also key that your feeding performance Max some good quality ad created particularly video yes the headlines say that pmax can create its own video but although it can do this automatically created videos rarely outperform really good quality videos put together by a professional marketer who really understands their stuff so if you can then feed performance Max with really good quality video assets and you'll tend to get better results the final thing we're going to cover on performance Max is that you can set rules for the customer acquisition that you want performance Max to focus on I you can say I just want you to focus on getting me new customers don't worry about people who've purchased before now whilst that sounds like the best option one thing to consider is that that campaign is like likely to appear to perform worse because obviously there are a lot of cheap conversions to be had by targeting branded search or running remarketing ads if you're just going after new customers then your customer acquisition cost is going to look a bit higher on the flip side if you ask performance Max to bring you new customers and existing customers or repeat customers you have to be aware that it may Target branded search so people that potentially could have clicked on a branded campaign that you've already got or even just gone through to your site organically and it's also going to be running remarketing ads for people who've already been on your site maybe even have been through your checkout process so whilst the performance of a new and existing customer acquisition performance Max campaign is going to look higher you've got to be aware that some of that is going to be you're paying a lot more for new customers and you're paying a lot less for existing customers and in that type of campaign you're getting a mix of both types and by the way if you're struggling with Google ads or you're thinking maybe I could get a bit more out of my campaigns then request a free website and marketing review from the teammate exposure ninja just go to exposureninja.com forward slash review once you've had your free website and marketing review we can also do you a special bespoke pay-per-click review where we analyze your Google ad campaigns and the performance across your different channels just mention it to the person that does your review for you and will be happy to get this arranged okay next up we have responsive search ads these are ads where you feed Google multiple headlines up to 15 and multiple descriptions and it then shows Searchers different combinations of these headlines and descriptions working out which are the best performing over time the goal is that potential customers see the right combination for them at the right time okay so what are the details here well usually Google will show three headlines and a couple of descriptions to searches it really depends on the screen size that they're using if someone's using a very large screen for example a desktop and the search results aren't that competitive then of course they'll see the three headlines whereas if they're searching on a mobile and it's a very congested search results page they might see two or even potentially only one headline and a couple of lines of description now one consideration here is that your headlines need to be sufficiently different you may be tempted to think oh this would be a great opportunity to split test the difference between say 50 now and save 50 today this isn't the place to do that Google wants sufficiently different headline options to show Searchers so what's actually more useful is using very different USPS or features or benefits of your products and allowing Google to split test the results when showing these this can also give you some really interesting customer feedback for example let's say that you're a b Corp and you offer vegan products and you offer next day delivery well you might be assuming that your B Corp status is the thing that everybody wants whereas actually when you look at the responsive search ad data that Google gives you you notice actually it's the vegan and next day delivery messages that resonate most with your customers and get the best click-through rate and conversion rate that might influence your future marketing another consideration here is that you can also pin headlines or descriptions basically telling Google that you always want that headline or that description to show and you can even pin these headlines in different positions in your ads generally we recommend against this because whilst it can be tempting to think ah that headline's definitely a winner actually we tend to get the best results when we let Google choose between the different headlines of course the caveat here is that if you have some sort of regular tree requirement to include a legal disclaimer or some sort of legal notice then you would definitely going to want to pin those in your ads so they're always shown but if you've been used to running standard text ads then running responsive search ads is a great test because we tend to find they perform better Google's own stats I think show a 10 to 15 increase in click-through rate with responsive search ads versus regular old Google ads next up Dynamic search ads these ads look at your website and inventory to Target keywords that you may not have thought to include in your campaigns this can be great for large websites for example e-commerce sites that may not have the time and energy to go through creating search ads for every single one of their products or categories Dynamic search ads use images and text copy from your pages to show in the search results now with Dynamic search ads you tell Google which Pages you want the ads to run against you can say you want all of the pages on your website although if you do that you do want to take out things like your privacy policy your terms and conditions probably about us and contact us Pages or you can tell Google that you want to run Dynamic ads to specific pages on your site or you can say we want to run Dynamic ads to specific categories of pages on the site Google will then generate the ads based on the copy and the headlines on those pages now now this comes the risk if your website is poorly structured or is difficult to find certain pages or if you're how do I say this if your headlines and copies suck then definitely don't use Dynamic search ads because it's going to use those terrible headlines and that awful copy in the ads although if you're running ads to terrible headlines and copy you actually probably don't want people clicking on those ads so a bad click-through rate might be a good thing because it will reduce your ad spend anyway you shouldn't really be running ads if you've got terrible headlines and copy okay so there you have it three Google ad Technologies to take your performance to the next level in the next year what do you do with this stuff now the first thing is to test moving ads from old formats to these new formats if you've been running smart shopping or expanded text ads these new formats should see you get a performance lift don't forget to consider using wide audience targeting for your performance Max campaigns so long as you're not getting some rubbish conversions and also consider consolidating top of funnel middle of funnel and bottom of funnel campaigns into the same performance Max campaign so you're giving Google's AI enough data to work with and even though these fancy Technologies use AI to test different options don't forget the basics of advertising still apply every so often you're going to need to refresh your ad copy and your creative if you see a drop in conversions and don't forget that your ad performance is much more down to the offer that you have the quality of your website and your product than it is fiddling with little bits of targeting inside Google ad strategies the best offer will win and advertising is just there to give the most coverage possible to your fantastic offer hope you found this video useful like And subscribe drop us a comment see you next week

Channel: Exposure Ninja

Views: 17,460

Keywords: expninvids, ppc, performance max, google ads, pay per click, responsive search ads, dynamic search ads, google ads 2024, google ads tutorial, digital marketing, google adwords, google advertising, google ads tips, google pay per click

Id: Xs43Q0eTadM

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023