Fix THIS & Get Better Results with Demand Gen in Google Ads

Right now I'm going to take you through the 3 biggest mistakes that I see businesses use when it comes to demand gen. And unfortunately, I see these mistakes time and time and time and time and time and time again, which is why I wanted to release this video. And let's get straight into it because the first biggest mistake that I see when it comes to businesses using demand gen campaigns inside of Google Ads is that they have only one ad group which targets all of their placements. One of the best things that I love about demand gen campaigns is that you can do your targeting by placement. So you can have ad groups that are only showing ads to not only YouTube but even in-stream, in-feed, and Shorts. And then you can also have other ads which are also specifically targeted to display. And then within those ad groups, you can then add the targeting around different audiences depending on the placements. So there's a whole heap of different options that you can use in order to really increase the performance of your demand gen campaign. That's why I don't I don't like seeing a demand gen campaign which has one ad group, and we'll get to it soon, even worse, with one ad, just with a collection of everything inside of that one ad group. And the reason for it is this, is because when it comes to demand gen, the overwhelmingly underlying theme of all of these mistakes is that businesses just haven't taken a step back to really ask the question of, what do I want to achieve with this demand gen campaign? If you want your demand gen campaign to be a remarketing only campaign, You can do that. You can even go down that I just want people who have been to my website or who have visited certain products or have been to my website and haven't converted. I want them to see this specific ad. You can do that. Or if you go with demand gen, we want this to be a bit more of an outreach, top of funnel campaign because, because we're getting really, really good results with our other search, shopping, Performance Max, what other campaign stack you're running. We can't increase budgets in those ones anymore. So we want to start reaching out to some colder audiences. You can do that with Demand Gen, but you've got to be strategic with your settings. And this is the fault, and people just throw Demand Gen in there, select all the options, put everything all together, and then they wonder why they're not getting great results. So when it comes to Demand Gen, you really want to be thinking about why you're running Demand Gen campaign, and that then would dictate your structure and the targeting that you use inside of your Demand Gen campaign. And let's jump into a screen share so I can show you what I mean. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you through how we structured these two Demand Gen campaigns that are inside of this same Google Ads account. But before we do that, I do want to let you know that this video is brought to you by Define Digital Academy, especially its Mastery Program. And Google Ads Mastery is especially for business owners or in-house agency staff or freelancers who want up-to-date information with Google Ads. And what I want to show you in through here is that inside of Google Ads Mastery, not only do we have our support feed, we've got live coaches in there 5 days a week answering real-life questions. You can also get access to our Claude and Gemini optimization tools. You get full access to them. So you can run through and use the same optimization stack that we use for our enterprise clients inside of Define Digital Academy. And then on top of that as well, we also run live weekly calls. And if you miss any of the calls, you can also watch the replays at any time. So, and you also get access to my full course. So there's a whole heap of everything that you need. And just to say thank you for following me on YouTube, if you follow that link in the description below, you can not only get all the information about Google Ads Mastery, but I'm also going to give you a 20% off discount code. Just make sure you use the coupon YOUTUBE at the checkout process, and I hope to see you inside of Google Ads Mastery real, real soon. All right, let's get back to Demand Gen. So when we looked at this account historically, what they had was one Demand Gen campaign just with one ad group, and they had everything, as I said, jumbled up before. So what we actually did through here is we've created two specific demand gen campaigns. One is for YouTube only and one is for display. Now there's a couple of reasons for that, mainly because for this product, the owner of this product is really, really heavy on YouTube. So we did find that we were able to essentially use YouTube as a bit of a remarketing type campaign inside of demand gen, and that's why we separated out that spend. But what I want to show you in from here, so what we're talking about is that when we actually go through and look at the ad groups for demand gen, what you can do is you can see from here is that we've got this one just going to the Display Network. We'll switch over to the the other campaign and in YouTube, 'cause I wanna show you this example is by breaking it out into the different ad groups. So we had one ad group for Shorts. I'll show you in through here. This one is set just to YouTube Shorts. This one is just set to in-stream. Once again, the way that you're doing this is that we are choosing, and then this one is set to in-feed. The benefit of that is that what we are able to do really, really quickly, and I'll just go back to the one campaign. Oh no, that's okay. We're seeing both campaigns. Here. So this is in the separate campaign. You could have them all together, but with this YouTube campaign, after we initially ran it, we saw that this in-feed ad group, it was just not getting any conversions at all. It also wasn't getting as much reach. We tried it for a number of months, and what we decided to do is to just pause that complete ad group, and we saw an increased performance in the other ads. So the benefit of breaking it out into different placements is really twofold for me. One, you're seeing a much faster data loop, so you can make these decisions on whether we pause that ad group. Also, what you can do, remembering, is that in Demand Gen, you can actually change the targeting at the ad group level. So if we wanted to, we've kept these all the same as the audience. You could change your audiences dependent on the different ad groups. The power in Demand Gen is the fact that you've got these, got these levers or these options for optimizations. So you can go in and look at the different audiences and you can see how they're performing at the different ad group level. And that's why I like having this structure of building your campaigns around your ad group performance. Alright, so that's the biggest mistake— throwing everything into one ad group. The second mistake is, is about the structure as well, and that's when we break it down to the ad level— having all of your ad creatives in one individual ad. And let me show you the example here. We'll go through and use display ad. What I like with this is that we can then go through and test these different angles. Now I have to blur a lot of these images for privacy. Now for privacy reasons, I can't go in and show you the individual ad angles, but what I want to let you know is that these are very, very distinct themes. So we have a before and after theme, we have a sale and discount concept. The before and after was working really well, so we ran another iteration of that. And then we also had a gifting option. When we go into the other ad group, and let's go into our Shorts ad group, you can see from here is that we've got all these different angles and we've been going through and testing. And if we ever see any that are not performing, so for example, with YouTube, what we're really looking at is, you know, how often the video is played to. So what we could see from here, these ones not, you know, what we can see from here, let's just go from here. We can see that this ad through here has a really good, uh, a really good play rate. So that hook is really, really good. We can see that we're holding, but we can see that people are starting to drop off. Whereas for this, whereas this one, we, I mean, we're looking at smaller, smaller data in here. We're seeing that's getting a higher conversion rate. Now we need to see more data before we make that full decision. But some of these iterations are where we've gone through and we've had a look and go, look, this ad performs really well with its hook, but then traffic starts to drop off, or it performs well with the hook, but it's not converting. So we can mix and match the hooks and the offers and the creatives and we can do it much faster by having individual ads. So rather than just creating your ad with all the different creatives in one, we break them out into different ads. Now people do ask, you know, how many ads should you have per ad group? At the moment, we would generally start with 3 to 5 different creatives or 3 to 5 different angles. It's highly likely that within the first month, 2 of those angles won't get any traffic or get very, very limited traffic. So then we move back to about 3 different angles, and generally what's happening from there, we've got 1 or 2 winner, 1 or 2 winners, and then some iterations from there. I'm happy to have 5 different ads, but just know that the 4th and the 5th ad don't really get as much cut-through. So what we may even do is we cut it right back to say, for example, 2 ads. We may then launch 3 new iterations at the same time. So the first 2 biggest mistakes that we see with Demand Gen, just to recap because we've gone through a lot already, is firstly having 1 ad group that hits all of your different placements. For me, you should be breaking it out into display, and then even YouTube, I break it out into 3 different things. There's a separate ad group for display, separate ad group for your in-feed, your in-stream, and your Shorts. And then also inside of those ad groups, you don't just want to have one ad, you want to have very distinct angles into separate ads. So, so for example, our before and after, our sale or discount offer, and then that way you've got— you've just got much more data to look at so that you can pause the underperforming ads, uh, and create new winning ads from there for split testing. Also as well, you can turn off underperforming channels much, much faster. So they're the two biggest mistakes that I see with demand gen. Now we're gonna stay here because I'm gonna show you the next option, but we do need to explain this a little bit. And the third biggest mistake I see with demand gen and Google Ads is that people use optimized targeting or the optimized targeting option the wrong way. Now I want to be really clear here is that I am not against people using optimized targeting inside of Demand Gen. It just needs to be done at the right time. Now, in case you're unsure, what optimized targeting is, is that it gives Google the option to go beyond the audiences and the targeting settings that you've put inside of your campaign or put inside of your ad groups for Demand Gen. The problem I see is that some people will go through and build out this remarketing ad group So they'll target it, say, just say, say for example, an e-commerce brand. They're wanting to target cart converters and they're wanting to give them a specific offer. So it might be a welcome back offer or maybe an extra 10% off offer. If you choose optimized targeting, it's going to go beyond those cart converters. So you do need to make sure that especially if you're running a remarketing or a retargeting campaign that you don't turn that on. For optimized targeting, I'm okay if you're especially looking at a top of the funnel campaign. And, and the reason for that is because you can actually see the data. And let me show you an example in through here. We know for this display campaign that we're running is that when we've gone through and created this audience, we've got a couple of options here. We've created a lookalike segment and we've got some welding interest in there. And you can see from here we have also gone through and excluded the purchases. So we're not— what, this is a one-off purchase, we don't want to go back and retarget them. But what we have done in through here is we're okay— is that in this case, we've actually turned off optimized targeting. Now, I would be okay for it in this case, but in this case at the moment, we've decided to turn that off. That would be a perfect example where we could have optimized targeting in there. If you do have it active, what I do want you to go through and check is if you go into your audiences, and when you go down to show the tab, if you go all the way down, you can see this data, this expansion and optimized targeting. You can see here we do have it active on other campaigns, uh, inside of this Demand Gen campaign account, but we can see the actual data. And with this one, we're actually okay with it cuz we can see here the click-through ratio is good, spend is low, but also the conversion rates are matching the other metrics. So when it comes to optimized targeting, the main thing to remember is, is this gonna fit in line with your strategy for Demand Gen? Like anything when it comes to Google Ads, it's not just a matter of turning things on. You need to have a real clear strategy. For why you're running the campaign in the first place. So as a recap, remember with Demand Gen, when it comes to your structure, make sure you structure your ad groups around the different placement channels. Have a separate ad group for display and have separate ad groups for YouTube. And you can even break it down into YouTube Shorts, YouTube in-stream, and YouTube in-feed. Secondly, with your ads, have— don't have all of your different ad angles in one ad. Break them out into different ads so you get that much quicker feedback loop on your ad copy split testing. So you can turn off those ads which are not performing and then create new creatives to add in some extra split testing. And then finally, when it comes to optimized targeting, really, really think about it and think about, does optimized targeting work for the goal that I want to achieve for demand gen? Thank you so much for joining me. Now, if you want to learn more about demand gen and when you should use demand gen, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. And if you'd like extra support with your Google Ads, and you want to— and you'd love to get live support every single week from me and my coaches, make sure you follow that link in the description below so you can find out more about Google Ads Mastery. Hey, thanks for joining me. See you next time.