Solid 2023 Google Ads Strategies That Work For Our Clients

SOLID 2023 GOOGLE ADS STRATEGIES THAT WORK FOR OUR CLIENTS

Google Ads strategies continuously evolve with time. To ensure you get the maximum results from your campaign strategy, you need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends. Whether you’re an experienced PPC expert or you are just getting started in this field, this article will be helpful for you.

We’ll discuss our top strategies, how they performed for our clients in 2021, and are continuing to show success in early 2023 as well. When compiling our strategies, we set two main goals: optimizing the budget and increasing conversions. Each of the below Google strategies presents specific ways we achieve these goals.

❖   Google Ads Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding strategies take the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids in Google Ads. When Google Ads first launched, bidding was manual. You would set separate bids for individual keywords or placements. Then, mobile devices came along, which created more signals that needed to be accounted for like device type, location, time, any day of the week.

Today, there are more signals than ever before. Imagine trying to consider all of these at once. The human brain couldn’t possibly cope with each and every signal. This is the benefit of Smart Bidding. It considers billions of signals to set the right bid for each auction. You then spend less time on manual tasks and more time on strategic efforts, while allowing Smart Bidding to achieve your business’ marketing goals.

How it worked for our clients

There are four Smart Bidding strategies that we successfully implemented for many of our clients in 2021 and are also showing success in January 2023.

For clients who do not have a specific CPA goal or for cases when previous campaigns had zero to little conversion volume Maximize conversions 

– Used when the client is focusing primarily on the number of:

1. orders,

2. people signing up

3. people contacting them

all this within a specific budget. For “maximize conversions” campaigns, we noticed significantly better results when we focused on smaller batches of longer-tail keywords (that are less competitive and have a lower CPC). Oftentimes, questions would work well for this type of campaign.

Maximize conversion value

 – Highly suggested for eCommerce clients who are not only looking for any type of leads but for quality ones that make high-value orders on their website. For this type of campaign, we received the best results when we used 5-10 SKAG campaigns all run at once, shuffled every 4-5 days with 5 new ones until a list of top 10 SKAG campaigns were identified.

For Clients who have a specific CPA goal and have more experience with Google Ads

Target CPA –

 For cases when we feel strongly about a certain average CPA based on our expertise, previous performance, best practices, etc.

Target ROAS – 

Requires conversion value tracking and is implemented best when we first test out the “Maximize conversions” goal, so that we know what a conservative ROAS can be.

One of our main suggestions to clients focusing primarily on Manual Bidding is to revert to Smart Bidding at least for a 4–8-week period so that more realistic benchmarks can be set. Most of our clients noticed that a simple switch to “Maximize Conversions” from Enhanced CPC has as much as tripled the return on every dollar spent.

❖   Google Discovery Ads

This campaign type helps to deliver highly visual, inspiring, personalized ad experiences to anyone who is ready to discover and engage with your brand. All this through a single Google Ads campaign spread across several different platforms. Examples include Youtube’s “Home” and “Watch Next” feeds, Gmail, and Discover, where millions of people scroll every day to catch up on their favorite topics.

Setting up a Discovery campaign is simple and should align with your marketing objectives. For example, you can focus on generating new leads, driving online sales, or building awareness and consideration for your brand.

When you use Google discovery ads, as the adviser you provide Google with images (including the logo of your company), headlines, and description lines. Google rotates them automatically to find the best combinations.

Through these types of campaigns, you will provide some of your highest quality content to a warm audience that is already on search mode.

How it worked for our clients

We started using this campaign strategy for one of our clients in the semi-luxury jewelry industry. When this client came to us in the beginning, they weren’t really seeing any return from Google ads. Their previous campaigns showed abnormally high CPCs. The bounce rate and average session duration weren’t bad but the traffic didn’t result in any positive return.

The client needed a more shotgun approach to Google advertising which involved more than just ads on Search. Among other Google strategies used, we utilized Discovery ads as a unique approach to promoting the clients’ high-end jewelry.

We came up with the idea of leveraging Custom Audiences created by search terms that we already knew our target audience would be searching for. This would certainly be an effective way of reaching out to more of the targeted audience for a lower cost. This proved to be the case.

We conducted extensive keyword research to identify more low-cost, high potential search terms that we could use to build our Custom Audiences. From all this, we identified three key clusters of high-volume search terms that we segmented to create three common Custom Audiences.

Then, we focused a lot of effort on building the right type of imagery and copy that work for each of these custom audiences.

The results were extremely positive. We realized that this newly used campaign strategy was considerably effective if implemented properly. The CPCs of the discovery campaign were 60% lower than the cost of the clients’ previous campaign strategies, and the conversion rate had improved significantly.

❖   Google Gallery Ads

Google’s gallery ads are swipeable, image-based ad formats that combine search intent with related visuals. These ads are shown on the top of SERP, providing better engagement possibilities from potential audiences. These ads are usually used to connect with people before they visit your website, but also serve as retargeting campaigns where more of your website imagery is shown to previously engaged audiences.

Gallery ads can compete with all other ad formats in an auction. Your gallery ad will be shown on top if you have enabled gallery ads and your bid wins top placement. If you are in the second position or lower, Google will only show the text of your ad.

Before you start using Google Gallery Ads, there are a few things that you need to know

❏    Google Gallery Ads are available in 11 languages

❏    They are shown in the first position on mobile

❏  Besides promoting products – they can also be used for B2B services, SaaS, or other use cases.

❏    Advertisers are charged one of two ways: character count & ad specs

❏    B2C and B2B brands can both leverage the ad type

❏    They are available in beta version to select advertisers only (for now)

We noticed that for Gallery Ads to show up on top of regular Google ads, it will require a higher CPC and generally better copy than those already outperforming ads. Despite the higher CPC, we saw a better conversion rate for these ads than for regular ones. A crucial element of this type of ad is that the landing page must be an even better presentation of the value presented in snippets during the user’s search.