Stuck at $5k/mo? The Google Ads Scaling Blueprint

Are you currently spending $5,000 or $10,000 a month inside of Google Ads and you want to be able to increase your budgets? But the problem is when you add more budget and more scale into your campaigns, your profitability walks out the door. Because ultimately, remember, the goal with Google Ads and paid advertising is it's not about spending more money, it's about ultimately getting more revenue and more sales and more conversions into your business. Because despite what Google says, it's not as simple as just increasing your budget from $150 a day to $300 a day or $500 a day, and magically, just like that, you see the same level of profitability in your Google Ads campaigns. I do really, really understand that this is a core point in your business where many business and brand owners get stuck when it comes to Google Ads. Because you've already overcome those first initial challenges with Google Ads. You've got your targeting right, you've got your ad copy right, you've been able to get your landing pages and your offers set correctly, where you are actually getting conversions and you've even got profitability in your Google Ads campaign. But then the problem arises in that you're able to scale up to a certain point, and quite often we see that somewhere between that $5,000 to $10,000 a month mark, and then you just can't scale any further. And the reason for that is because when it comes inside of Google Ads, once you've overcome those initial hurdles, you do need to really look at some individualized strategies that are going to work for your business. So what I wanted to do in this video is I wanted to pull back the curtain in some of our real-life accounts where we've been able to scale these businesses from either that $5,000 to $10,000 mark up to spending well above $50,000 a month inside of Google Ads. So the good news is, is that yes, you can do it, but you need to be making sure that you're doing it in the right way. Now, as I said, because I don't want this video just to be another talking head video, we are going to jump inside some real-life Google Ads campaigns so that I can walk you through the challenges that we faced and how we solved them. But before we get to that, if you are one of those businesses that are spending between $5,000 to $10,000 a month inside of Google Ads and you want to get your business to the next level, I do invite you to also apply for our on-demand program. Our on-demand program is specifically designed for businesses and brand owners like you who are running their Google Ads by themselves and they want to be able to scale well above that $10,000 a month mark. What's unique about the on-demand program is we call it a done-with-you program, so you are still in the driving seat, but we are there right beside you with live one-on-one coaching calls, and also with a private Slack channel so that we can give you the exact next steps you need to take in order to break through to those next levels of spend and profitability in your business. And what makes this program unique is it is business first. And what I mean by that is that before we even have a look inside of your Google Ads account, we first want to understand the drivers of your business and what the goals are for your business. So then we can overlay that with your current Google Ads strategy and pinpoint the exact areas where you need to change in order for the next levels of success. If that sounds like something you would be interested in, why don't you just follow that link in the description below where you can find out more information about On Demand and how you can use it to build your business. But with all of that said, right now let's get back into the teaching. So when it comes to scaling past that $5,000 to $10,000 a month mark, you firstly need to overcome what I call the algorithm trauma. And you may have had this before where everything looks great inside of Google Ads and you think, well, let's just take Google Ads recommendation at its word and increase our budget by $100 or $200 $100 a day, whatever that process may be, and you see the spend go up but the conversion metrics don't follow it. Now, some people will just simply look at the fact that you may have increased the budget too much, and that can definitely happen. And we do recommend that you do, do your budget increases, especially your first initial budget increases, in smaller increments of about 20% every 5 to 7 days. And then when you're okay with the results, you then increase that budget further. But that is only going to take you so far with what we call vertical scaling. Because as powerful as Google's AI and smart bidding is, one area where it can still get stuck is that if you don't have the correct campaign structure, what you can find is that Google keeps on spending money on the same limited products or keyword themes. And the way that you can tell if this is happening in your campaigns, if you're running a search campaign, you might have 5 different ad groups and you can see that every time you increase your budget, that money is still going to those top 2 spending ad groups Or if you're running Performance Max or a shopping campaign, when you go through your products, you find that there's only about 20 to 30% of your products that are getting the vast majority of the spend. And then what happens from there is that in those campaigns, your CPC starts to increase and you're not getting any extra profit out of it. Once again, because as I said, what's happening is Google is just spending the money in the same area trying to generate conversions off those same keyword themes and those same products. Now, as I said, I want to make this as practical as possible. So let's now jump into a screen share so I can show you some actual trend lines of how you can see when this is happening, and then we'll go into the solution. All right, so what I'm going to show you here is I'm going to show you an example of an e-commerce example and also a lead gen example. So to let you know that this kind of insight works on both types of campaigns. What you've got here firstly is you've got a Performance Max campaign, and for this business, when they came into the On Demand program, they had one Performance Max campaign for all of their products, and they had one shopping campaign once again for all of their products. The problem is, is that they had well over 40 or 50,000 SKUs, and what was happening here is even when previous agency that they were working with was throwing more budget into this campaign, what was happening is you can actually see that the ROAS was actually going down and the actual clicks were going down as well. And the reason for why that was happening is because you could see this CPC resistance. It's going up from $0.76 all the way until we stopped it where it breaks that $1.15 mark. Then when we go over and look into a lead generation campaign, similar thing that had happened. The previous agency, they had started this campaign, started to throw some money into it, and you could see the CPC spiking from $80 up to $230. Then it went up to $247, and then it even had some massive spikes up at that $5 before we came in and cut that out. Let me explain what was happening here in both situations, because even though one was for an e-commerce store with over 50,000 SKUs and the other one was for a local lead generation business that had 5 core services, the same thing was happening in that whenever they were throwing their budget into the Performance Max campaigns, what was happening was it was spending more and money on a really, really tiny pool of products or keyword themes. And then to get the same cut-through in those small, tiny keyword themes or product groups, it was having to bid higher and more aggressively for the same traffic, seeing those diminishing returns. Now, this is something you need to be really, really careful with, especially when you start with Google Ads. I'm a big believer in less is more. And what I mean by that, you don't want to be having multitudes of campaigns. So generally, when you start inside of Google Ads, I want you to think about having the least amount of campaigns as possible. So that you can consolidate your conversion data. But what then starts to happen is that there will become a point when you start to increase your budget inside of those campaigns, you'll start to see your CPC spike and you'll start to see less return. And then you want to go through your ad groups, your keyword themes, or your products, and you want to have a look and go, where is Google actually spending your money? You could do this through— if you're running scripts, you could do this through a product labelizer script, or you could do this through an end-grant script. What we're doing more and more inside of Define Digital Academy is actually just exporting the product list or exporting the keyword or the search terms and just putting it into Gemini and asking them to do a product labelizer script or to do an n-gram analysis. And what that's going to give you is it's going to let you know where Google is currently spending its money. But what it's also going to do, it's also going to let you know about where you're losing money and where some potential winners are. And that's what we want to focus on. If you can take a step back inside of Google Ads and just not thinking about what you need to be doing in terms of your optimizations, the easiest way to break through that next level of spend, as I said, looking outside of Google Ads and really starting to think about this easy transaction of where can I force Google to spend more money so I can get better results? And where do I want to stop Google spending money so that we can reduce the wasted spend? And that's why you do it with those n-gram analysis or with those product labellizers, where you can go, this is where Google's spending the money, this is where we're getting great results, so let's continue some spending there. This is where we're getting bad results, let's stop the spend there. But the key area is looking for potential winners. And what you're looking for here, some people call these sidekick products, or sidekick keyword themes. And what you're looking at here is you're going, these search terms or these products are converting, they're just not spending enough money in Google Ads. Let's now jump back into the screen share so I can take you through the journey of what we took through. Once again, I'll show you through the e-commerce example and the lead gen example to show you how we solved this problem. When we're looking at the e-commerce example, you can see from here, before they came to us in January last year, they were spending $32,000 a month. And this January we got them up at $75,000 a month. Last February they were spending $55,000. This February they got up to to $91. So you can see some pretty significant increases. But the great thing is what you can also see is that the conversion value has gone at the same level. So we've been able to maintain their profitability for them. And you can also see as well, we've also been able to maintain their ROAS levels for them. So this has been a real success for this business. But what we actually did, and I want to show you and take you back in time. So this is January to March last year before they were with us. You could see what was happening. They were spending pretty much all of their budget across two campaigns. It was one Performance Max campaign, which hadn't been changed from a Smart Shopping. It had just been upgraded. And then they'd also set up a shopping campaign. If you have a look at what we've done now, is that we still have this shopping campaign running through here, but rather than one individual Performance Max campaign, we've now broken that out to 6 different Performance Max campaigns. Now I want to be really, really clear here and to let you know that we did this over a staged approach or a staggered approach over a 9-month period. So we just didn't launch all of these campaigns. We launched one at a time, sometimes 2 at a time. And remembering that if you've got a smaller you will not need this many campaigns. The reason why we had this many campaigns, remembering this business has over 50,000 SKUs and they've got 10 core product categories. So what we did here is we then started going through and working with the businesses of these product categories, these core product categories, which each have thousands of SKUs within them. Which one is more profitable to your business? And then we just start through that process and going, well, this product category, so we'll just call it product category B, you're not getting very much spend at all, but it is converting. Would you like more conversions here? So what we did was is we broke out that product category, paused it from their current campaign, set up a new campaign, and then only had those limited SKUs inside of that campaign. And now let's jump over to the lead gen example because we did the same process here. So we're looking at once again the process from January to January. We started again with this one in July, and you can see last January they spent $12,000, so just above that $10,000 a month. This year we've got them up to the $20,000 a month. This purely came once again us looking at the same strategy. Previously, they had it all set up in one search campaign, but what we did here, we broke out some separate search campaigns that especially in this peak period coming in through December, and that it allowed us to add in extra amounts of budget. But you could see the skyrocketing results, and we replicated this. So now they have got, with their different search campaigns, rather than just one core search campaign, we broke out to another two search campaigns. So they've got a total of three search campaigns. Then we layered Performance Max over the top, which we're going to talk about more very, very soon. But once again, what that allowed us to do is that we saw the problem here was that when we're increasing out the budget in that Core 1 search campaign, we had 3 different very clear ad groups and keyword themes. And in this case, we saw that Google was only spending the money in one core keyword theme. So what we did from there is we broke out 2 other campaigns on those other keyword themes that were not getting any spend. And once again, we just forced Google to spend some more money on lower volume keyword themes that were converting at a higher rate. And that's the sweet spot that you want to find, is you want to find, are there any products or keyword themes which are converting, but because they've got a lower search volume, Google just doesn't prioritize it when it's stuck with higher volume searches. And an important step that you really want to be thinking about there, and when you are breaking out any of these additional campaigns, you do want to make sure that you're not sabotaging that core priority campaign. As a general rule, what we will do there, the product category or the keyword theme or ad group group, which is getting the most spent and most conversions, that stays in the original campaign. And then you break out another campaign for another product category or for another keyword theme, and that becomes your segmented out campaign. The core thing of what you're looking at doing here is remembering that your budget control is set at the campaign level. So you are forcing Google to spend more money in areas that you know you are already getting great results. But remember what I said at the start of this— don't think that more campaigns equals more success. And when you are just starting with Google Ads, You want to be starting with less campaigns so it is consolidated. And when you start to see that CPC resistance, that's when you start thinking about running these breakout campaigns. So that's the first way that you can scale, is what we call that vertical scaling, where essentially you're spending more money in areas or keyword themes or products that you know are already converting. Now let's talk about the second strategy for scaling, and this is what we call horizontal scaling. And what this is, is that you are looking at bridging that intent gap. This is where you've exhausted the impression shares for your bottom of the funnel on high-intent keywords. The key metric that you want to be looking at here is your search impression share. And once you start to see your search impression share, you know, hitting above that 60%, or click share if you're running in the world of shopping campaigns, that's when you know that you need to start reaching out to either two things: similar or related keywords, or new audiences and/or new networks. The way that you could do this is that you could be looking at running new keyword themes, so higher keyword themes, and these could be benefit-related keywords. So for example, you are not targeting the search term or the product title that people would be searching for your product or service. You're targeting the problem that your product or service solves. Second way of going about it is by reaching out to new networks. One of the great things I love about Google Ads is you don't only have that search network. You can also reach out to YouTube. You can also reach out to the Google Display Network, do remarketing campaigns, whatever you need to do in order to see more profit in Google Ads. And what you want to be doing here, this is where you're starting to layer in, say for example, Performance Max campaigns over the top, or you're even layering in a YouTube campaign or a demand gen campaign to start reaching out to those colder audiences and all those keyword themes that you're not already targeting. And going back to that lead gen example, this is one of the ways that we've done it through here, is once again, as we said, we broke out some extra search campaigns, but we also laid in a Performance Max campaign, which allowed us to push out another $12,000 in spend while keeping it profitable for this business. So as a wrap-up, when it comes to scaling past that $5,000 to $10,000 a month mark inside of Google Ads, I want you to think about those two ways that you can scale. Firstly, that horizontal scaling, and this is where that when you start to see your CPC start to increase in your current campaigns, you start to look for any of those potential keywords or potential products that are converting and they're meeting the conversion metrics that you need to see, but Google is not spending much money there. That's where you look to break— add some breakout campaigns or segmentation campaigns to force Google to spend money where it is currently not spending money. But remembering that when it does spend money there, you do get some extra conversions. What you're looking for essentially there is product categories or keyword themes that are converting, but they've got a current low spend. And then secondly, once you go down that process as far as you can, you then start reaching out to what we call that horizontal scaling. And this is when you're then looking to target new keyword themes, or you start to reach out to new placements. And this could be either a YouTube or Demand Gen or on the Display Network. Thank you so much for joining me. I really, really appreciate your support, and I love having you here inside my YouTube channel. And remember, if you are one of those businesses that are spending between that $5,000 to $10,000 mark and you're ready this year to really start scaling to the next levels of success for you and your business, why don't you follow that link in the description below where you can find out more information and also apply for our on-demand program. And if you'd like to learn some more specific strategies about how you can scale your e-commerce brand, go through and watch this video right here. Or if you need to generate more high-quality leads for your business, go through and watch this video right here. Look forward to seeing you next time.