How to Scale Google Ads Past $10k/Month [Without Tanking ROAS]

If your business or brand is currently spending under $5,000 a month in Google Ads and you're already getting sales and conversions, but you want to be able to scale profitably to above $10,000, $20,000, or even $50,000 per month, it's not as easy as just increasing your budget inside of Google Ads. So unfortunately, the simple solution of getting from $5,000 up to those $10,000, $20,000, or $50,000 months inside of Google Ads spend is not just as simple as just simply increasing your budget inside of your current campaigns. Now yes, while it is true that your first step, once you are getting some good conversions and sales data inside of Google Ads, the first step to increasing how much you spend is by simply increasing your budget inside of your current campaigns. But unfortunately, the reason why that strategy only has a limited time where it can be successful, because at some stage you will hit what I call CPC resistance. Now CPC resistance is a term that I use to explain to our members and my clients that, that at some stage you are going to face a wall where you can't just increase your budget in order to get the same results inside of Google Ads. And now I don't want to focus this video on CPC resistance, but to put it simply, CPC resistance occurs when your search impression shares start to get to that point where when you increase your budgets inside of Google Ads, you you either see a large spike in your CPCs or the conversion metrics are just no longer profitable. And when you get to this point, you actually need a proper strategy so that you can go through and continue to scale profitably so that you can see more sales and conversions inside of your business. And there's 3 main levers that you can use in order to scale profitably. And these principles which I'm gonna take you through, the good news is, is that it doesn't matter whether you're a lead gen or an e-commerce brand or what type of service or product you use, the principles are exactly the same.. And in this video, I'm gonna focus on those 3 core principles, or 3 levers, which I like to call them. But before we get there, as a business or brand owner, you do need to understand firstly, before you even think about scaling, you need to stop and check to make sure that you have these core metrics right in your account. Because if you don't have these metrics correct and your account isn't achieving these metrics, at some stage you're gonna have to come back and rebuild these metrics again. So, and we much prefer And so our strong message here at Define Digital Academy is, is that before you even start down the path of scaling, you want to make sure that you've got these core metrics working and that these metrics are hitting these levels inside of your account. Otherwise, you're essentially just going to be wasting money. And the first metric is your click-through ratio. And before you even start thinking about scaling, you'd be wanting to make sure that your search campaigns have a click-through ratio of at least 8% and your shopping campaigns or your shopping feed ads that are appearing in those search networks have a click-through ratio of at least 1.5% or more. Now, for all of these key core metrics, I am gonna give you a very, very brief explanation because I wanna focus the video on those levers. But I do want to make sure that you understand these metrics and why they're so important. And when it comes to click-through ratio, the pure reason for why you wanna be hitting those metrics of 8% or higher for search or 1.5% higher for shopping is because as you start to scale more and more, you wanna make sure that you've got everything in your favor. And one of the core things is your ad relevance. And you do need to understand the pure mechanics of the Google Ads auction. And one of the core features of the Google Ads auction, or one of the core mechanics of the Google Ads auction, is that Google gets paid when someone clicks on your ad. And that's why you do want to make sure that your click-through ratio is at least matching your industry standard, but in most cases that it's better than other people that are appearing inside of your same auctions, so that you're giving Google more reasons for it to show your ad above your competitors' ads. And if you don't have a high click-through ratio, you're gonna have to be paying a premium in order to get the same level of visibility. Now, that might be okay when you're playing with a small budget, but once you start increasing that spend, you want to make sure that you've got everything working in your favor so that you can continue to do it profitably. So firstly, you need to make sure you're hitting those metrics with your click-through ratio. Secondly, now this is an important one because we don't only want people to click on your ad, we want conversions. So you need to secondly make sure that you're hitting these conversion metrics. For search campaigns, they need to be above 5%. And for your shopping campaigns, these need to be above 3%. Now the reason for why we look at these conversion metrics is because when we're looking at scale and when we're looking at increasing the spend on your current campaigns, you wanna make sure that you don't only have a well-structured Google Ads campaign, but we need to make sure that the landing page that you're sending people to or the product page that you're sending people to and your actual offer converts. Now the reason for why this becomes so important is because further down the line, especially when we start reaching out to colder audiences, you don't want to be going through and testing your landing pages and your products and your offers. You need to firstly make sure that these are working and they are high converting even before you start thinking about putting more money into the Google Ads machine for your business or brand. Number 3, we're gonna stick to the topic of conversions, but you want to be making sure that you're hitting at least 50 conversions a month. Now the reason for why I say you want to be hitting at least 50 conversions a month is because The 50 conversions a month is the base level for when you can start using Target ROAS or Target CPA at a campaign level. Ideally, you want those 50 conversions inside an individual campaign. And the reason why this becomes so important is because as we're going to be throwing more and more budget into these always-on campaigns, being able to use a Target ROAS or a Target CPA guardrail really does allow you to have some safety when you're increasing the budgets, especially if you can have some bottom line, high-performing campaigns that are always hitting those target ROAS and those— or those target CPLs for your business. And then the final box that you need to tick before you start moving into aggressively scaling your spend inside of Google Ads is probably one that a lot of people don't think about. But if you already have a Performance Max campaign running in your account, you want to go through and do a channel performance report check. Make sure that Performance Max is spending at least 90%, 90% at a bare minimum on your search and your shopping ads inside of your Performance Max campaign. Now, if you're a lead operation business, obviously that will only be in the Search Network. If you're an e-commerce, it doesn't matter whether it is swayed towards Search or Shopping Ads or Search with, with Product Data Ads as Google presents it inside of Performance Max. Now the reason for why you want that above 90% is because if that is lower than 90%, and especially in some extreme cases where you see the vast majority of a Performance Max campaign spending on the Display Network or YouTube Network or Discovery Network, that raises a really big red flag for me. And what that red flag is, is you don't have your keyword signals and you don't have your product data or your conversion data is not clean enough for Google to be able to target your bottom of the funnel searches. So it doesn't have enough data in order to really display those ads on the Search Network. So with all that said, if you've got those 4 tick boxes ready and you can hit all of those metrics, your account is ready to scale. And as I said, the first step is just purely to increase the budget inside of your current campaigns. But where I want to pick up from here is what happens when that no longer works. And as I said, you've got the CPC resistance, CPCs are going up, or your conversion metrics are breaking, or you're just adding more budget and Google is just not spending it. You've come to the time where you need to use one of these 3 strategies or levers in order to scale your business or brand to the next level. All right, now because I want this to be as practical as possible, what we're going to do is I'm going to take you through the 3 core levers that you can use in order to profitably scale your Google Ads campaigns. And as we're going through and describing this, I will also take you through some real-life accounts that we're currently scaling to really show you and walk you through how we're practically doing this inside of Google Ads campaigns. And the first strategy that you can use is what I call segmentation. Now, when it comes to segmentation, the strategy that you're doing here is effectively you're forcing Google to spend more money on in areas that you know are converting, but that Google currently isn't spending as much money in it at the moment. Now, you could do this via locations. So you're looking at locations where Google is spending. You might see some states or some cities or countries where you're getting a lower amount of spend but a good or high level of return in terms of conversions. You can simply break out some of those campaigns to force Google to spend more money there. You can do it by products or services. So if you've currently got products combined into a campaign or services combined find as a campaign, you can break them out and segment them out. You can also do it by audiences, but it is a little bit trickier to do by audiences because you do need to make sure that you've got it, that you've got those settings and guardrails set on both campaigns or the, all the different types of campaigns. The, the examples I'm going to give you here now is breaking out the segmentation by either state, by either locations, or by your products or services. But in both cases, what we're doing is we're just trying to find and force Google to spend more money in areas that we want to spend in. Now the reason for why this works you need to remember that with Google, your budget is set at the campaign level. So what you can sometimes find is, especially when you start to spend more and more, Google will, Google will spend more money in, in high population states or products or services that have a higher volume. So let me show you an example. So we've got this business and they started off spending $15,000 a month. They are now up to $46,000 a month. In this particular example, we're helping this business to get above $200,000 a month in spend. So we're being quite aggressive aggressive with this. But what you can start to see from here is we did firstly have to go through and fix up some of their conversion value. And when we go, when we go over through here, it— so in this level, it looks okay. Like, it looks like it's going up. Don't worry about the conversions dropping down because as I said, we did switch over their conversion tracking through this section. Is when we look at the last 30 days, you can start to see, we're starting to see their conversion metrics go up. And what we also found from here is that this was the first budget increase. We've now added in extra budget increases and the spend just hasn't moved. So what we're doing now is that we're using their location data to break out their spend. So what we've done from here, where we've purely gone into audiences, keywords, and content, looked at locations, and I want to show you in through here. At the moment, I've filtered this down by conversions. So we're looking at— let's, let's pull out the top. We'll go, we'll see how big this screen is. So out here, we're looking at the top 10 states. In America based on conversions. At the moment, their search campaign— so their strategy, their structure at the moment is just one search campaign. They've got also one Performance Max campaign. They do have Demand Gen running, but that is a retargeting only campaign. I've filtered this down by its conversions. Let's now filter this down by cost. Remember previously we were looking at the top 10 states in terms of the number of conversions. So now I've filtered it down by cost, and what I'm looking at through here— let's Broaden out this sphere is we can see some states down here like Pennsylvania. If we go even further down, let's go to 50. We can see some— let's just use Pennsylvania as an example. Is with Pennsylvania here, I'll just unselect all of these other ones. When it comes to cost, we've spent under $1,000, $800 on it, but its actual return, it's giving us 10 conversions, and the conversion metrics for that is, is well under what this needs to be for this business. And we can also see here with this search impression share, we're only hitting it under about 30% of the absolute top. So there's still some room to grow this, this state. So what we can do from here is that we could pull out this state and add in a Pennsylvania/campaign. Now the reason that— the thing I like about this strategy is that we are not— we've already got a proof of concept. So we know the keyword targeting works, we know the ad copy work. And we know the landing pages work. So all we need to do is we're simply pulling this out into its own campaign to force Google to spend more money in that state. Now, the other way they can do this is through products. Let me show you this business through here. They came to us in December, and since that time, we've been able to increase up their spend, up from $6,000 a month up to $18,000 and $15,000 a month. So 3 times the level of spend. And we've been able to also maintain their ROAS, so they're sitting above the thousands. And the way that we did this is I want to show you in through here. In December, they only had 2 campaigns running, and they had 1 search campaign and 1 shopping campaign which is running all of their products. Now, this store had like, I think it was about 30,000 different SKUs. Now what we did here is we took their— let me just show you the last 30 days. We took their 2 campaigns and we broke it out into— we added 3 different Performance Max campaigns. And with those Performance Max campaigns, what we did is we, we segmented them out by product categories. We took the core product categories that were either performing really, really well. We wanted to push extra budget there, or those ones that are underperforming and we moved them out further. So essentially there we've done— we've used the same strategy. So what— and what the strategy is, is by segmentation, We've either by locations or either by product themes or product categories, we've moved them out into separate campaigns because we had highlighted that these locations or these product themes, they were converting, they just weren't getting enough money. So we put them into their own campaign to really force Google to spend that some more money in those areas. Now before we go to the next two leaves, I did want to let you know that here at Define Digital Academy, we've actually created a tool which is called our Keyword and Search Terms SWOT analysis tool. And what this does is it not only audits your current campaigns, but it also gives you a SWOT analysis looking at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And when it comes to the opportunities, what it does look at, it lets you know about different keyword themes, or you can also give it your product data. It lets you know different product categories which are underspending and could be considered for breakout campaigns. If you want free access to that Keyword and Search Term Audit tool, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below. Use it. The great thing is you can add it to your own campaign data. And if you are interested as well, is that that's actually only one of 5 tools that members inside of Define Digital Academy get access to. So we've got all tools around your ad copywriter, we've even got a CRO landing page expert, and also smart bidding tools. And you can get all of that inside of Define Digital Academy. To get the free access to the search term audit and SWOT analysis tool and find out all that information, just follow that link in the description below. Alright, so that first lever you can use is segmentation. The second lever that you can use is to introduce or layer on top new campaigns. And a classic example of this is that if you've just focused on your search and shopping campaigns or your search-only campaigns, whichever way you're running, you could then layer in a Performance Max campaign, or it could be a Demand Gen campaign, or even a Demand Gen campaign. And what you're looking at doing here is essentially you're starting to look to build out to some newer and similar audiences and keyword themes. And ideally here, you really want to be leveraging using any of Google's AI tools. So it's smart, and that's why we would— this is where we would enter in a Performance Max campaign. And let me give you a classic example here, is that this is a business where they're 100% focused on search, and it's been working really, really well for them. So you can see from here, they started at $1,500 a month, they're now just broken that $5,000 a month, and we were able to grow them profitably all the way up only using search. You can see from here they got, you know, a nice level of conversions. You can see here in the last month it's just started to drop off, and the reason for that is this is a classic example of CPC resistance that I was talking about earlier in the video. When they first started, their search impression share was 20%, and it's now grown up to 64%. And I want you to see from here, you know, as they've been going along their CPCs have increased and now they are up at $7.60, whereas previously they were at, you know, they started at $2. Now, the reason why we were able to make that work as we're going along is because obviously we increased their conversion rates from, you know, 1%, that's all the way up to now 10% and 8%. So even though the CPC was getting more expensive, we were able to, I guess, overcome that maths by increasing their conversion metrics. But now they're at that point where they just can't push it any further. So, you know, if we look in through here, you know, the conversion rate is still heavily dialed in, 10%, 8%, and their search impression share means that we can't really reach out any further on the current search network. So this is a classic example of when we would introduce your Performance Max campaigns. And especially for here as well, they have— we have started to break out a new campaign, but this business only has two core So there's really no other new search campaigns that we can build out to. And that's why for here it's a perfect example of moving to Performance Max. So that's the second lever that you can use. The third lever that you can use is what we call essentially reaching out to colder audiences or prospecting or your top of the funnel. And that's essentially where you are now really starting to look and go, we've already built out our Search and Shopping. We've already added in some Performance Max and other campaigns. You may even done some demand gen and you just need to go even higher or even further. Now, one thing I do really want to highlight here is that you do need to understand that when you get to this level, this traffic, it's not necessarily the CPCs or the cost per conversion may get higher. A lot of the times it does, but also at the same time, it's going to be a longer window. So you have to have a lot more patience because you may be targeting traffic that may be, you know, even 1 month, 2 months, or 3 months before they're ready to convert. So you do have to be a lot more patient around it. And that's why generally you don't, you don't move to this level until you've already maxed out everything else. And let me show you an example here. This is a business that we've been working with now for coming on nearly 3 and a half years, 2 and a half, 3 years. We started with them in the middle of 2023. At that time, This is looking at quarterly data. They were spending about $15,000, under $15,000 a month. You can see from here it was ranging between $10,000 to $15,000 a month. That's looking at quarter data. And now they're up at $86,000 in that quarter. So, so that's, you know, in the mid-20s. Sorry if my maths on it, getting closer to nearly $30,000. So it'd be about $28,000 a month that they're spending. And you can see from here, you know, we've been able to maintain their cost per conversion. And their conversions have also grown at the same level, but they are now reaching that same level. Now I want to show you what we've done through here is that when they came to us back here, they only had— they had 3 different campaigns running. There was 2 different search campaigns targeting their 2 core products across all of America. They did have Performance Max. It wasn't set up right. We had to set it up and then restart it. So what we have done from here is you can see here that we've already, in terms of search campaigns, we've already broken out about 15 different search campaigns. We've also already added in Performance Max, and we've also added in Demand Gen to go into a retargeting campaign. And they're at the same point now where they want to grow to the next level of spend. And the only way that we can do that is to layer in some YouTube campaigns and also some Demand Gen top-of-funnel campaigns We're not doing retargeting. We're gonna be building out lookalike audiences, and we're also going to be going through intent targeting. So that's the next step of where this gets to go to. Now, when you are spending at that level and you are really looking at moving into more of your demand gen and video campaigns and even your display campaigns, what becomes really, really important is that you need to make sure you've got a proper testing framework for your creatives, because at this level It's not just about targeting keywords. It's not just about targeting audiences. It's making sure that your creatives are built and that you've got a proper framework for, to be able to actually test those creatives. And because that's such a big discussion, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. It's where I had an extended discussion with one of the Defined Digital Academy coaches, Brent Neal, and he shared his actual framework that he uses for testing creatives especially with your video and your image-based creatives. So thank you so much for joining me. My name is Aaron Young from Defined Digital Academy. I look forward to seeing you in this video, right, real soon. And remember, if you want to get access to that keyword and SWOT term analysis tool, just follow that link in the description below. And finally, if you are a business and you are ready to scale to the next level, what I would encourage you to do is, when you're in the description below, is to find out some extra information about our on-demand and also our newly launched Defined Digital Academy advisory programs. And this is where we can partner up and work closer with you to see real success with your Google Ads campaigns. See you next time.