Creative Testing Framework for Google Ads

Google Ads stands alone as a unique platform where it not only provides e-commerce brands the opportunity for direct marketing through targeting specific search terms through its search campaigns, shopping campaigns, and even Performance Max, but it also gives you the ability to not only retarget users who have gone to your site but haven't yet converted, but also reach out to brand new people who haven't even heard about your business or your brand before.

And you can do this strategically through your creatives, and you could do this through a YouTube campaign, through a Demand Gen campaign, or even through display. Play campaigns.

But unfortunately, many brands don't have any strategy when it comes to testing what creators work, so what images and what videos actually cut through and help to build your business and your brand. So that's why I invited Brent Neal, who is one of the coaches inside of Define Digital Academy, where he's going to share with us the creative framework that he uses, which helps brands not only reach out to new customers but also retarget and get higher results inside of their Google Ads accounts. So right now, let's jump over to Brent to go through the creative framework.

Welcome back, and we've got Brent Neal, who is obviously one of the coaches inside of our on-demand program. And I invited Brent on today because what we really wanted to go through is, this is very much gonna be focused for e-commerce brands, and we're gonna specifically be talking about creatives. And Google is great at giving some data around creatives, but a lot of it is very much around click-through ratio, view-through rates, Brent's got a framework that he uses, and that's why I wanted him to come on and speak through this. But it is important to note that what we're very much talking through here is this is very much going to be for brands who have already got some successful and profitable Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns, and they've got more money to invest inside of Google Ads. And so this is very much going to be around your creatives that you could be using inside of YouTube campaigns, demand gen campaigns, and even display campaigns. So Brent, I'll throw it over to you for the framework, which you're going to be talking about, which is the cost curve response.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. So before we get straight into that, I think that the main pain point that we're looking to answer here is you are trying to test some more creators and try expanding up a little bit further up the funnel through maybe DemandGen or YouTube. But either previously when you've done that, you might have done it with a fairly reduced budget, and then what came back was a very bad CPA or bad return on investment, or you may have spent a fair bit of money on it and you had some little wins, but you didn't really know why something might have won. So the whole idea of these 3 frameworks in this whole system put together, the whole idea is to have a level of structure behind how you qualify or disqualify creators and understanding that why they may not have worked as well. Yeah.

And my big thing is the reason why I wanted to get you on to talk about this is that I still think for a lot of brands, they just haven't put, for me, I think there's just so much, or not for me, I know there's so much opportunity, especially on YouTube for creative brands, because there's not as much spend there as there are on some other platforms. So it really is a big opportunity, especially remembering that not only do you have mobile and computer, but you've also got TV devices there. So you've got a really broad range of devices that you can test on. But yeah, please, please start.

Awesome. So the main thing here is most people will be measuring their success metrics through soft metrics. Which would be like our click-through rate, view rate, engagement, and watch time. And whilst that's all really interesting, what you're really measuring is how much attention have you grabbed, but that doesn't measure impact. So how much revenue we generate from that is a much better question to ask. And this is much more towards that bottom of funnel to middle of funnel stages where you're looking to convert people, not just build a brand awareness or a level of brand consideration. Our hard metrics, so these are the 3 different framework metrics that we'll be looking to score and measure against, which is your cost curve response, K-rate, and then your portability score. It'll sound really, yeah, I guess fancy, but at the end of the day, it comes down to a lot of metrics that we already have a pretty good understanding on.

Hey, we're gonna get right back to the discussion with Brent very, very quickly. But what I do wanna let you know that this training and this video is brought to you by Define Digital Academy. And inside Define Digital Academy, we have 2 specific programs which are built for brands like you who have already got past the first stages. So they're already getting conversions, they're already getting sales, but what you need is you need the expertise in order to scale to the next level. So if you're interested to find out how Define Digital Academy can help you grow past spend levels of $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, or even higher, I encourage you to follow the link in the description below where you can not only find out about our on-demand, but also you can find out about our new Define Digital Academy advisory program. So regardless of where you are with scaling your brand right now, Define Digital Academy has the exact structures and frameworks and support that you need so that you can skyrocket your brand. If you'd like to find out more about on-demand or advisory, I recommend that you follow that link in the description below where you can find out more information, and you can also schedule in a specific time with me so that we can discuss how we can help your brand grow to the next level.

See you soon.

So first one is our cost curve response, so CCR just to abbreviate it. The whole idea here is you're testing 3 different— so you're testing the exact same creatives at 3 different spend levels. And what you're looking to find here, or the 3 outcomes you're going to find, is looking at this chart here, we're looking at our CPA. So if we look at our hero creatives, essentially what happens is at higher spend levels, you will find that they will maintain a similar sort of CPA. When we go into our standard creatives, these are typically creatives that they will start to decay over the course of, you know, higher sort of spend, but they're not necessarily audience locked. And then the final one is our audience pocketed creators. So these creators, they break at scale, which usually means that they are only really successful with a specific type of audience or an audience at a specific stage of that customer journey, whether it be right down the bottom or right towards the top. So the whole idea here is you're seeing which creators are the most scalable and the idea of the hero creators here is it suggests that they will be scalable across every audience, and these are the ones that you're really looking for is what maintains that CPA at higher spend levels.

Before we move on there, probably some things that we probably should look about because there's so many different campaign types that we can talk about. Let's just maybe just forget about display for a little bit, just because I don't want too many variables in here, but if someone's just starting in this journey of really going, look, we're really gonna hit creators, video, and images across the, Google platforms, are you doing this testing? You starting with one central, say for example, Demand Gen campaign or one YouTube campaign, doing some testing, and then if you see some really, like you're saying, that the real audience specific, would you then break that out into a separate campaign or what's kind of your testing protocol there?

This can really come down to a lot of different factors such as budget. That's usually the biggest one that comes down to is if we have enough budget to be able to separate this between images versus video testing, then that's always the route that I will go. But if we're really starting out with more of a curiosity of just validation, do we have a level of success within Google to focus more on our creative activities or should we really be devoting most of that energy towards shopping and search where we know we're already getting some pretty good results?

Yeah, you go.

If you can have allocated spend for individual creative types such as image versus video, that's always the best route to go. If you don't, then I usually suggest start with video and whatever investment you're going to put towards building creators, that will probably be best spent in ad spend.

Yeah, and that's an important metric too, is it? I mean, we did say this at the start, is that if you are just, you know, this is really talking for brands who are finding a little bit of resistance with search, shopping, Performance Max, and if you're wanting to break out, you've got some extra things, this is kind of the next level to go into. But before you can throw a whole heap of money on it, these are the type of things that you're going to be looking at first.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's no, no point spending money if you don't know how to measure it, right?

Yeah, no, definitely, definitely. And, and also too, I'm probably— the other thing that I add in there is as well as I'm really, really big with creatives is that when we're looking at the individual structure, I do like to structure things in similar ad groups. So that way, the reason why I do it that way is that I don't like to have a whole heap of different angles inside of one ad. Sorry, I meant ad. I like to have, so I'm okay to have different creatives inside the same ad as long as it's the same angle. So it could be a before or after angle. It could be a direct product comparison angle, but you could have different iterations of there. For me, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. When I go down this path, I'm always looking at firstly, before I go really deep into iterations, I'm more looking at what is the angle that works for this brand? And then from there I can break out into the different iterations. And the angles I mean like that is, as I said, you know, does before or after work? Do customer testimonials still work? UGC, is that the, the best thing for the brand? Then before you start, um, so you just don't want to mix the signals too much.

Yeah, exactly. And this, this whole framework isn't here to tell you what to create or what to test in terms of creatives. This framework still works on if you want to go towards, are we just going to try and validate YouTube? Does YouTube work as a platform? It can go that gran— uh, sorry, that high level, but you can also go down to the granular level of We've got 3 different UGC creators. One's a guy, girl, and then a family. Now you can start to create tests that go into very granular sort of detail to figure out which ones seem to resonate with your audience better.

Yeah, so you know, you could even get to the point of a guy in a car. So we work out first the guy speaking works better for the product, but a guy driving in a car works better than someone sitting in an office, but then someone walking outside works even better. And that's kind of what we're talking about. Same, same angle, but the iterations are the things that you can really start to bump up that initial resources.

Exactly. And we'll move on to the next one, uh, just really quickly for anyone that is watching. Of course, there's a bit more of a breakdown here as well. Yeah, um, if you do want a bit more of an example as to how that looks, just pause the video and have a bit of a read on those. Some of the examples, you know, $5,000 a day. I know most brands probably don't have $5,000 a day just to throw into creative testing. So just use that as a bit more of a comparative example.

Yeah, great. All right, you move into the second framework. Yep.

So the next one is our creative decay rate. So what we're measuring here is how long does it take before our creatives start to find a little decay and drop off in terms of performance. This comes down to, of course, your duration. You probably hear the term creative fatigue much more commonly associated with Meta. But at the end of the day, that concept very much still applies in, in Google. So the first thing we're gonna be looking at is for strong image creative, the half-life, which is how long does it take before our CPA doubles over the course of time. Our half-life, if it's between 60 to 90 days, then we have some very strong creative. And then for video, if it's between 90 to 180 days, given a bit more time, then that's a strong video creative. If it's earlier than that, then it's usually a bit of a, poor creative or it's, I guess a lot of the time you come down to like sales, there's always some contextual thing behind it as well. If you're running Black Friday, you're probably not going to run it for about 180 days.

No, no.

And if you do, let me know the results because I'm kind of curious now. So the whole idea here now is we're looking at, okay, we've got some creatives, how long, and this is more of the, I guess, matured accounts who have probably done some testing before. They want to see how long can we actually run it before we need to get new cycles of creatives in and disrupt that. Creative fatigue penalty.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's where you're basically going that, you know, the angles that are working, but eventually that, you know, you may need to, that's where the, I guess the iterations become important of, we still know the angle works. We're just getting a little bit of fatigue here. So now we need to freshen up that same angle, maybe move it slightly in certain directions or change the angles and change the messaging. But yeah, so that it's, it's, it's freshening from there.

Yep, exactly. Cool. Then the final framework. Is our cross-audience portability score, or shortened down to CAPS. Essentially what we're doing now is how often would you— I mean, very few brands that I know really just run one demand gen campaign across absolutely open targeting towards everyone. But how much of that creator success has been due to someone at a different stage of that purchase journey? So now what we're trying to do is we're trying to separate and try and find which creators were actually impactful because of the creative as opposed to that person was already going to purchase. So now we're looking at essentially segmenting our test based on 3 to 4 different audiences. Again, just comes down to budget and what you're— how detailed you really want to go towards. You've got retargeting, you've got demand gen, you've got lookalikes or similar to lookalikes where you can go towards people or they specific nature towards the customer list that you want to target. Cold prospecting, and then you've got broad demographics, very much open targeting. The whole idea behind this now is we're trying to figure out if we have a creative that seems to work really well with retargeting, it doesn't work very well with our broad demographics or our cold prospecting. Fantastic. We know exactly what type of creative now aligns with what person at what stage of their purchase cycle. Of course, in order to test this, you do need a pretty decent sizable budget. You're essentially splitting down what was— you're essentially multiplying your budget by 4, testing by 4. But this is really important for most brands to know at some point in time, especially when they are growing and scaling, is why did that creative work? Is it because they were already going to purchase and it maybe was a bit of a fabricated result, or did it actually genuinely drive, say, retargeting? Actually drove people that were abandoning cart, maybe they just got on the website, wherever it might be, to make that purchase quicker. So it drove urgency or fear of loss or whatever it might be. Same thing with Cold Abroad. Was it more so just a creative that helped captivate their attention and maybe spark a little bit of that consideration and bring in a lot of newer traffic for other efforts to convert?

And this is why it's so important that as we sort of said at the top and repeated a couple of times, this isn't you're not doing this your first, probably even your first year on Google unless you've got ridiculous amounts of budgets because you've got, you've got so many things you've got to work out first. So, and that's where your, your Search, Shopping, Performance Max campaigns come in. You know, you're testing your traffic, you're getting, you know that your landing page works, you know your offer, offers works. You don't want to be testing your landing page and your offer, um, when you're trying to work out these, these audience targetings. That's, it's really important there. And the other thing that I like when we get down to this part is that you really need to be thinking more strategically about not just where it's sitting in terms of the audience, but what that message needs to hear. So if we go, your cold audience, I sort of say that, like, I kind of go, there's more levels, but if you look, break down into 3 core levels, if you go, your top of the funnel, it's very much introduction. You may be hitting in some unique selling points, you also need to be hitting those emotional points, all of those things. And you may need to do that multiple times through different ads. Then when we pull them into the middle of the funnel, it's really about presenting the offer, moving barriers for purchase. And then when we're getting to that retargeting, very much just, you're not introducing, they know the offer, you're just reminding them, reminding, reminding, reminding, reminding until they actually finally come through and buy.

Yeah. And the beauty of this test as well is you can use the same creative across all different stages. It actually more so helps identify what stage was that the most compelling. Yes. And that's why it's really important. So the whole idea between these images here, we've got audience locked, which is something that has a really low CPA with retargeting, but then has a really high CPA. This which is what most brands see, you know, retargeting converts really, really quickly, but then cold audiences, it seems to have a really high CPA. Naturally, you're gonna have a higher CPA towards your cold audiences 'cause you're prospecting, simple as that. You're gonna be spending a lot of money on people that haven't shown any interest versus people that have shown a lot of interest. But if that, that weighting is significantly higher for cold to broad, you can't scale that creative. It's not an evergreen creative that can be used across all stages. And that's okay because we now know that that's very much bottom of funnel retargeting, get people in as soon as possible type of creative. Most of the time you can kind of guess that, but yeah, having the data always supports it. Have you—

are you guys—

sorry, over here is these are the creators that genuinely are scalable at multiple different stages. So yeah, same thing for like retargeting is some people really just need an offer or something that's just going to get them through the door ASAP. Like you might run some sort of sale to get them back through, but a lot of the time it comes down to education as well, providing value, that same value could actually be used at different stages of different audiences as well. So that's a genuinely scalable creative.

What I was gonna ask is, have you got, and this is gonna be really, really a broad question, so it's not gonna be specific because every brand is gonna be absolutely different, but do you have any type of frameworks on, I guess, types of themes of creatives that work best at different levels? And let me give you an example and then you can iterate from there. So we found a brand that I was working with is that when it came to retargeting, simple product campaigns were— and I mean, what a simple product, it was essentially, it was a, um, just snoring mouthpiece. Yeah. And it was just basically a video, a short video of the guy, no, like holding it, talking about it, and just pulling out all the features. Absolutely killed on retargeting. But top of the funnel did not work. I mean, it worked, but not the same level. But then they had a whole heap of, I guess, like short reel type videos with, I mean, the brand owner was the actor in it and different things. Didn't work for retargeting, but it was that first step in the journey that worked really, really, really well. So a bit more of a, I guess, a scripted written ad was working in there. So do you have any frameworks or trends that you've seen like that, that it can always be different for every brand, but at a retargeting level, this type of ad works better, whereas at a cold audience, this type of ad works better?

Yeah. So what you generally expect.

Yeah.

When it comes down to, because you always have your expectations when you go into like, hey, this is a 20% off, very much a heavy sale banner or 10% off new customers, you're probably, well, your first time order, you're probably not going to expect that to work at the broad level because why does 10% off matter for me if I don't even know who you are or what you sell? So naturally you've got those expectations when you go into it. I generally come down to Does this person know who we are, why we do what we do, or even know that they need us? So if they know who we are, that's much more retargeting, selling, you know, just doing whatever you can to get them over the line as soon as possible in a way, maybe providing more value. Maybe it's testimonials or reviews, something like that. So social proof, it could be sales, it could be a range of different things. If they know who you are, do they know why you do what you do? So this person here is more so say problem aware, probably the best way to put it. They're problem aware, but maybe not solution aware. You're talking a bit more about why your product, say like all your founder stories are really good for this. We're talking a bit more about why we actually came to existence and how we blow our competitors out the water, how no one else possibly does it like we do.

Yeah.

And then your cold audience is, do they even know we exist? And this comes down to are they actually solution or sorry, problem aware? Do they know why you would even be in the space? Have they even seen that name? Do they any of that? Basically completely cold. If that's the case, then you're not trying to sell them. You're just trying to introduce your brand or your product in a way that feels harmless. You're not trying to necessarily sell it. You're more so trying to provoke thought around, I could actually see myself needing this. Interesting. As opposed to 10% off.

'Come in now.' Yeah, and that's the way I've always thought about it, is obviously that first level in when you're doing the cold audience, you're very much just introducing yourself, like, 'Hello, we're here, we exist.' Yeah. Then when you start moving them down a little bit, 'You know that we exist, but this is why we exist and this is how we can help you.' And then as you move them down the funnel, it's, 'Look, this is the actual offer, you know, are you going to buy? And this is how you get started.' Yeah.

What do you need from me to purchase, basically?

Yeah, exactly right.

Now I know you've got one more slide here where you kind of pull it all together with hero creatives, so it'd be great if you could go through that.

So this answers a lot of your earlier questions as well, which is when would you do, you know, when would you use different frameworks? Reality is if you are working off millions of dollars a month budgets, use all three and you pull them together to find out what your hero creatives are. Obviously that's not realistic for most brands. The quicker way to sort of figure out what is going to be the more effective testing, ideally you do want to have a level of understanding for each of these 3. You want to know what type of creative seems to work really well, how long for, and to what audiences. Let's say image-led accounts, so someone that's in an account that seems to have a level of success with images but not as much with video, you're going to go towards your CTR. So framework 2, where we're looking at our DK, how long can we run these image ads before they just essentially become no longer efficient? Especially with Google, we're not really running this stuff social media platforms, it's going to be on primarily websites. It does become a little bit washed down, same as social media, but seeing the same ad over and over again, it just becomes a little bit more— you become blind to it. Video-led accounts. Now we're going to start looking towards our C.A.T. So understanding what stage of the funnel or what stage of the customer journey, whatever it might be, is your video creative the most effective? So you're able to provide obviously a lot more information within a video. Naturally, you're not thinking too much about is this creative actually working? It's more so thinking about what audience seems to work best and you can do more about that as well. You can tell more of a brand sort of story or provide more awareness towards problems that people never even knew they had when you can actually tell a bit more of a story. And then finally, anything that's a high spending account, you'd be looking at your different cost, your framework one, which is your difference to cost breakdowns based on same creative, 3 different budgets, which one seems to perform best, which one's, or which creative seems to hold out at a higher budget range. And then that's where you're going to figure out your scalable creatives. And most of the time you're not really focused too much on conserving your budget towards your bottom of funnel and trying to make every dollar count. You're probably focusing more on brand awareness and consideration. Australia used to, but bring it all together. If you were to find success in all 3 of those areas, that's some amazing creatives. You can scale them through the room, through the roof. Through the roof.

Through the next room too, maybe. You never know.

Yeah. If you're in an apartment, there's a lot of rooms to go through. So, yeah, bring it all together. That's essentially how you'd be using the frameworks to solidify your creative testing outside of we've got an increased watch time, or people seem to like this because we've got a 75% completion rate.

What—

and we'll, we'll finish with this last little brief discussion, because a lot of brands, generally what they find is that they still have in their head, they've got Meta is the, the metaverse, is the creative image video, and Google is very much where you do your search and shopping. Now, we do find brands at scale, they do get to this point where, especially if they're running third, third-party attribution software where they're starting to go with, even when we throw money into Meta and when we even throw money into our current Google environment, which might be Search Shopping, Performance Max, nothing really is really moving the dial any further in the right way that we want to go. So if you've got a brand like that and they do have some serious money to spend behind, the first step moving across, are you recommending for them just to start bringing their first round of, like, start bringing learnings from Meta across, or does it need to be different, or is that a really good starting point?

Yeah, that's a really good starting point. I think the biggest issue here is most brands will just assume that what works on Meta will work on Google. So at the end of the day, you need to test creators. If you're like, hey, we've already got 100 different types of creators that have been running over the course of years through Meta, great. Why would you not test that? You've already got that done. Get started on testing it, but just don't assume and say that, oh, because we can't really measure it in Google, that is probably one area where Google lacks more than any other is in terms of measurement. It does take a bit of time for Google to learn and get some sales on the board, at least in platform. So I think a lot of people sort of discount Google's in-platform metrics saying that usually we have a $40 CPA, but for this campaign we've got a $250 CPA, but they just kind of put it down to, yeah, but it works on Meta, so it must work on Google. So that's fine. They need that there anyway and they just completely ignore the fact that that's probably underperforming.

Yeah, and there's two things I'd go— is one, I'd go don't discount underperforming creatives on Meta because they may work in the Google sphere. The other thing that I would say as well is that when you do get in this path is that Google probably does have a bit of a halo effect with its other campaigns inside of the Google Ads dashboard. So the other thing that we would always keep, keep an eye on and remind brands of when you start gearing up spend in creative type whether it be video or display, you really have to, you can't just look at the campaign data inside of Google, you need to also go back and go, oh hey, our CPCs have dropped, or our cost per conversions on our search and shopping campaigns have increased, because that is another thing that we see quite commonly.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly right.

Hey Brent, as always mate, absolute pleasure having you on and coming on and sharing your knowledge, and we look forward to seeing you next time.

Awesome, thank you very much. Hopefully this framework is useful for at least one or two people.