How I Use Different Google Ads Campaigns

Google Ads currently has six different campaign types that you can use to promote your products or your services for your business. And if you use the wrong campaign type at the wrong time, this can severely impact the level of results that you will see with Google Ads for your business. So right now I'm going to break down the different types of campaigns that I use. But more importantly, I'm going to show you exactly when I use Google each of these campaign types that you have available to you in Google Ads. And all of this information which I'm going to share comes from my experience in running Google Ads campaigns since 2010. And in that time I've run campaigns for e commerce businesses, Service based businesses, B2C businesses, B2B businesses, software as a service companies, and countless local businesses. And just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy and and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. If you are setting up a new Google Ads campaign for a service based business, my go to campaign to start with would be a search campaign. And if you're an E commerce business, I would start Google Ads with a combination of a search campaign and a shopping campaign. Now I know with E commerce products a lot of people will go straight to the shopping campaign running that by itself. But the reason for why I'd recommend also adding in a search campaign right from the start is because the search campaigns will give you an extra ability to add in some extended ad copy headlines and descriptions. And these extra ad copy headlines and descriptions can become a very powerful tool for selling your e commerce products, especially if your product has a higher price point than your competitors, because you can use these headlines to highlight any unique selling points which you and only your product have. So with that said, for the majority of businesses, you're gonna be starting straight away with either a search only or a combination of a search and a shopping campaign. And the reason for why I'm recommending these two campaigns as your lead off campaigns in your Google Ads account is because these two campaigns give you the most information out of all of the other campaigns that Google currently offers. And that's because these two campaigns give you the exact search terms that a user uses so that you can find out which of the search terms generate the highest clicks and also the highest level of conversions. And then furthermore, to both types of these campaigns, when you manually add in audiences, you get to see the exact data down to the clicks, impressions, click through, ratio number of conversions, cost per conversion, et cetera, et cetera. All of that powerful information and you get to see it at an audience and a demographic level. And then finally with your search campaigns, you can split test different ad copies so you can start to find out which messaging, so which call to actions, which headlines work the best for your services or your products. And right now we're going to jump into a screen share so I can show you the different levels of detail that search and shopping campaigns give you, which the other campaigns in Google Ads don't give you. Right, right now. But before we get into that, I do want to point out with both your search and your shopping campaigns, a key element for success to make sure that you're seeing success in those campaigns, is that you need to have a very clear optimization strategy. And what I mean by that is you need to know exactly what you're going to be optimizing in your Google Ads campaigns, those search and shopping campaigns, every time you go into Google Ads. And that's why I want to give you my free Google Ads optimization checklist. And, and this is a checklist that I still use today. And it lets me know exactly what I need to be optimizing email Google Ads campaigns every 72 hours, every week, every month and every 90 days. And if you want to get your free copy right now, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description. All right, let's go. So first off, let's jump into a search campaign. So you can see straight away with this search campaign, when you go into these keywords section, you can not only see the keywords that you've actually entered in to target those ads, but, but when you go down into this search terms report, you can see all of the individual search terms which have triggered your ads. And then what you can also do from there is you can also filter this by conversions. So you can see the top user search terms which are generating these conversions. And then you can see all of this other data in and around conversion rates, cost per conversion, your different click through ratios and your average cpc. And then from there we can also go into our audience and with our audiences, we can then even break this down to see which audiences are giving the highest level of clicks, the highest click through ratio and conversion rates. And then when you filter this down even further, you can see this once again for demographics based on age, gender and even household income. And this is fairly much the same as well when you move over to a shopping campaign. So under the keywords tab, once again, you can see those different search terms finding those search Terms which are generating all of those conversions, you can then once again see that cost per conversion and those conversion rates and you can see the same level of data for the audiences. Now, in shopping campaigns, you don't get it down to that demographic data, but you can definitely see it in and around the different audience segments, once again seeing which audience segments are giving those highest level of conversions and click through ratios. But when you head over to a performance max campaign, you only get this data in here where you go into this insights and it just gives you some general data. So rather than the individual search terms, they're all grouped together. And even when you click in further to this View Details section, once again you're not getting the full level of data like you see in a search campaign. And then once again when you come into these audience insights, once again it's all grouped together so you're not seeing the individual level of data which you see in those search and shopping campaigns. And further to that, you're not able to add in those individualized bid adjustments which you can add in here in your search and your shopping campaigns. And you don't have the option to add in any exclusions. And just like we see with the keywords and also those audience data, the same thing happens with your ad copies in your search campaigns. You can see the individualized data for your ad copy, so you can see which ad copy gives you the highest click through ratio and also those highest conversion rates. But when you go to the performance max campaign and look at the different ad copies, once again, it just gives you some general information about which headlines are performing the best and which ones have the lowest performance. But you're not getting that individualized data so you can make specific optimizations. And that is why I recommend that you should start with search and shopping campaigns, because you're going to get that data so much quicker. And that important data which you need especially around your ad copies, is some important data that you can then feed into your performance max campaigns. So after I've started a search and a shopping campaign, if I wanted to, I would then introduce a performance max campaign. And what we spoke about before with the fact that performance max campaigns don't give you the same level of data as search and shopping campaigns. This is why I don't start them right at the start. And the reason for that is because performance max campaigns are a smart campaign. And what that means is that rather than you running the campaigns through different optimizations and targetings is that Google does this for you. Now, don't get me wrong, the Google algorithm is smart and it will work it out eventually. And that is the problem that for many businesses, they don't have the time and the budget to waste in order for the Google Ads algorithm to work out what are the best keywords, what are the best products, what are the best searches to target for your business. But I do find that this is a lot more successful once you have some baseline data in your Google Ads account. Because with your Performance Max campaigns, Google Ads is heavily relying on the audience and conversion data that is in your account. And if you don't have any data in your account yet, Google will just large scale testing in all different areas in order to find out that best converting traffic. But if your Google Ads account already has that data, it gives the Google algorithm a much stronger foundation to start from. And this is where I'm seeing a lot faster results with Performance Max if it comes as a secondary campaign after you've already done some search or some search and shopping campaigns in your Google Ads account. And the reason for this is because when you're starting a Performance Max campaign after you've already had a search and a search or shopping campaign active in your account, you can start off the campaign by adding in some all important exclusions so that you can focus that Performance Max campaign on the product categories or the services which you know convert on your website. And then when you're creating the asset groups in Performance Max is you're starting off with headlines and descriptions in your ad copies which you know are already the highest performing headlines and descriptions for your click through ratios and your conversion rates because you've already reviewed and seen that data in your Google search campaigns. And right now what I want to do is I want to show you how you can add in some different exclusions into a new Performance Max campaign. So when you're in your Performance Max campaign, you want to go into this settings tab in here and then from there you want to scroll all the way down to this additional settings and then under that additional settings you want to go into this filter final URL expansion. And what we can do is that when we've got this on, we want to click on this exclude URLs. And let's just say for example, in this campaign we only want to be focusing on our one bedroom Seminyak Villas and not our two bedroom Seminyak villas. So what I'll do is I'll go over into the rules section and then in this URL I would say contains and we would go to and then you add that through here. And now what that's going to do is that's going to stop our performance max campaign and targeting any of the services or the products which are related to a URL which has this two bedroom villa extension in the URL. Now, if you're running an ecommerce store, I use this strategy effectively to be able to create performance max campaigns for individual product categories. So for example, I've got a product category in and around swimwear and then another one in and around dresses. In the performance max campaign for my swimwear, I would go into this rules section and add any URLs which I know have the product name of products other than swimwear. So those dresses or those leggings or tights or any other products and then I'll do the reverse in that other campaign. Whereas I would add in swimwear in those other performance max campaigns so that I know that these certain products are only showing in the individual performance max campaigns that I'm wanting to target. And then from there we just go through and click save. And then the next type of campaigns that I'll introduce into my Google Ads account is Google Ads display campaigns. Now, as a rule for display campaigns, I won't start these until at least I've had other campaigns active for 60 to 90 days. And the reason for this is because display campaigns operate different to your search and your shopping campaigns in that they are a push campaign. And what I mean by that is that unlike search and shopping campaigns where your ads are triggered when someone completes a Google search, with display campaigns, your ads are shown to people who are on different websites or apps within the Google display network with the targeting being completed by you selecting some different audiences and demographics that you want to see your ads, meaning that that person may be seeing your ad without even knowing or completing a search term related to your service or product. And it's because of that function. The way that the display campaigns function is the reason for why I wait a good 60 to 90 days before I start any display campaigns. And the reason for that is because I want to first see the actual demographics and audiences which provide me the best click through ratios and also conversion rates for my services and my products. And then secondly what I also want to see is I want to give Google time to create some Google Ads optimized and also similar lists where which Google will create in the audience manager. And let me show you that right now and to see this data where you want to go is you want to Go into your tools and settings, then under the shared library, go into your audience manager. And then this will bring up the different audiences which Google has assigned to your account. So you'll have your remarketing lists in through here. And what you'll have from here is you also see some other lists which Google will start to create for you. So if you're running an E commerce store, you'll see lists like past buyers and product viewers. Obviously, your past buyers are people who have purchased your products in the past, and those product viewers are people who have gone to specific product pages but they didn't complete the conversion. And then further down you can also see those shopping cart abandoners. But what you also do start to see in your Google Ads audience manager after that first 60 to 90 days is Google starting to create some of these similar lists. And what these similar lists are is, as the name explains, so similar to all converters, this is creating a list of people who have the same similar online behavior, same demographics, same audience segments as people who have previously converted on your website. And then from there, Google also has what it calls its AdWords optimized list. And this is a combined list based on available data sources. And like those similar lists is that this is looking at in terms of your adwords traffic recreating similar audiences, which Google knows performs well for your product and services. And then from here you also have that similar to the AdWords optimized list, which just takes that a step further. So by delaying my display campaigns for a good 60 to 90 days before I start using those campaigns, it allows me to start those display campaigns with that extra audience data that Google has been collecting in your Google Ads account. And from my experience, this data can be the deciding factor between having an underperforming display campaign versus having a display campaign which can highly increase the performance of your Google Ads account because they're seeing your ads time and time again after that first interaction point, or you're getting some outreach at a much cheaper cost than what you would do by using a search or shopping campaign. And then this brings me to the final campaign which I use regularly with Google Ads, and that is video campaigns, or most people know them as YouTube campaigns. Now, I do need to stress with this type of campaign, it is heavily reliant on your ad, remembering that your video ads could be going up against large multinational companies. Now, for example, with a search campaign, it's quite easy for you to match the same quality if you're up against a large international brand because you're both limited to a certain number of characters and you can only display your text. Whereas with a YouTube campaign you could be competing against a large multinational brand, say for example Nike, with an unlimited budget for creating video content. Now this doesn't mean that you can't have success with with video campaigns, but I do want to stress and point out that this type of campaign is reliant on the ad content because you've got to be able to engage a user in those first couple of seconds of them seeing your ad. Now having said that, a couple of little points that I will say about video campaigns is that firstly, don't think with the video campaigns that you have to go for that bottom line conversion right from the very start. So for example, if you're an E commerce store, you can don't think that with your Google Ads video campaigns that you need to go straight for a conversion. Because I've seen a lot of success in focusing video campaigns to just get people to sign up to your newsletter, your membership or to get a free download. With the core action being you getting the user's email in return for a first purchase discount or a download guide that they can use for their services. And then once you've got this email, you can then target them through your email and your database marketing. And then the second thing that I would also point out about video campaigns where I've seen a lot of success is by you specifically targeting other competitors YouTube channels. So if you're going up against a competitor and you know they have a really engaged audience on YouTube, you can specifically target that YouTube channel with your ads. And further to that, rather than going down the path of having to use expensive influencers, you can still target their audience by targeting their YouTube channel so that their users are seeing your ads before they can go through and watch that influencers video. So that's my guide and how I use each of the different types of Google Ads campaigns. And I hope that the main thing you've picked up from today's video is that regardless of which campaign you're going to be using in Google Ads, you need to make sure that you've got a specific strategy for each type of Google Ads campaign so that you know how and when you're going to be using these different campaign types that Google offers you. Now at the moment I will say that a lot of people are having some issues with performance max campaigns and a lot of this comes down to people just haven't set those exclusions correctly or they haven't got a clear strategy on how they want to use Performance Max campaigns to grow their business. And if that's you, what I want you to do right now is to go through and watch this video right here where I outline the some of the best ways that you can use Performance Max campaigns. Thank you for joining me. See you next time.