Google Ads For B2B: Frameworks, Structures & Setups

Harry Hughes: Hi and welcome to Unqualified Leads. And today we're actually going to be discussing, and this is our first time ⁓ doing a podcast purely just on Google Ads. But I thought this would be a good podcast just to kind of introduce ⁓ our frameworks, systems ⁓ and ⁓ ways in which we prefer to when comes to running Ads. This is particularly focused on lead gen and B2B.

This is not covering e-com. But I think I often see Google Ads being run in different ways. I don't necessarily think there's always ⁓ particular in which your Google Ads campaign should be run. I think many of the top marketers and top Google Ads specialists, they will all have their own nuanced ways of running Google Ads.

But I do think there are systems and frameworks that most of those people will follow and so there is kind of a gold standard way in which you should be setting out at least your Google ad account. Some ⁓ the frameworks ⁓ use can chop change and we'll come ⁓ on ⁓ when might change certain frameworks, when you might use others. So we'll come on to that. But if we just kind of ⁓ go to the start a Google ad account.

So if you're an agency and you're jumping into a new Google ad account, what are the things you're kind of looking out first and foremost? Or if you've just joined the businesses, head of marketing or head of growth, whatever it might be, you're jumping into the Google ad account to check out exactly what they're doing. Then these are some of the kind of the immediate things that I would be looking for before delving into the frameworks and the overall setup of the account. The first place that I go to as soon as I jump into a new ad account, is the conversion tracking.

That's the number one place that I will go to straight away. And there's just a few things I'm checking there. The main thing is that I'm just looking to see what exactly it is that they're using as their primary conversion action. So what is the goal that this company is running their Google Ads for?

Most instances in B2B, it might be book a demo, sales call. That's kind of the common one that we're looking for. Or a lead form field. They're kind of the main three.

Now with what you essentially are looking for here is that you want that your primary objective to be your primary conversion action. So within Google Ads you have a primary and a secondary conversion action. The primary conversion action means that Google will actively optimize its campaigns towards achieving that goal. The secondary is more of an observation conversion action.

So you can actively sit there and see the amount of phone calls you've had for example if that's a secondary conversion action or email sign-ups is a good one you might use visits to the pricing page for example that might be a secondary action so at least you can see the count of conversion actions you're getting there but the actual campaign itself won't be optimized towards those and so that's the first thing that I'm going to be checking there is okay what's being counted as a primary and what's being counted as a secondary.

The reason why I check that is because there have been accounts I've jumped into before where I've seen what should be a secondary conversion action being counted as a primary. So for example, I've seen the pricing page view being set up as a primary conversion action. Now, I would typically like to avoid that because my goal as a marketer is to generate as close as I can to the end result, which is obviously a closed one deal. So taking those steps back from that close one deal, what is the further step back that we can get and it also being meaningful.

And at this point, for example, it would be a demo booked or a sales call booked. So that's the conversion action, ⁓ the action I really, really want. And I want everything to be optimized and to be focused towards that, ⁓ not step before that, which is somebody just viewing a pricing page because that doesn't actually tell us anything meaningful. It shows some intent, but it doesn't show us that actually trying to get there and book.

So I don't want more people just to visit the pricing page. I want more people to be booking a call, booking a demo. So therefore that's what I want to focus on. And that's what I want to gear everything towards.

So that's the first thing that I check. Dan: It blends the... it blends like the algorithm's ability to optimize for the right action essentially. So if you have pricing page, if you have email sign up, if you have conversion, you have all three, all three of those events set as primary, you will obviously have a lot of conversions all flooding through for the, a lot of conversion volume for the algorithm to optimize towards.

And really when you're in that auction, you want to be finding people, like you say, who are going to be taking the most valuable action for you, not. jumping around and finding all three. So you can very quickly feed the campaign with lower intent data essentially. And you likely say you want high intent individuals rather than the other.

Harry Hughes: Yeah, absolutely. And another thing to think about as well when it comes to conversion actions is just to make sure that you've covered all your all bases on conversion actions. So if you have different ways of contacting your business, so let's say you have an email click, so you've got the email in your footer, which someone can click and it generates an email. Or if you've got your phone number on the website somewhere or you have a contact form on a different page, which is separate to your main demo book lead form.

I would like to see all of those bases covered in your conversion action. Not all of them should be primary, but you should at least be covering them. So at least you can see where your users are going. I think that's also really important.

And if you have downloadable guides, resources, anything like that, webinar signups, just make sure that you are tagging those as conversion actions so that at least they are visible because there might be other actions that users are taking that you... perhaps might not have thought they were taking. So you might run a campaign and all of a sudden you see that you're generating a substantial number of webinar registrations or certain PDF downloads that were unanticipated, but at least you're recording them and knowing that they're coming from this Google ad campaign.

So just make sure that you do cover all bases and cover as many conversion actions as you have available on your site. Just make sure that you split them out correctly between primary and secondary. The next point on conversion actions, I won't stay on this point for too long, just to make sure that you use ⁓ kind of closest type of conversion to source as possible. What I mean by that is try to avoid using GA4 as a conversion action.

GA4 data is, again, you're not primarily going straight from source to source. ⁓ It's third-party platform. And often the GA4 data is more delayed and often is more inaccurate than going straight to your website. So ideally do not use GA4 as a conversion action.

I do appreciate that in some instances if you're using third party APIs or different meeting schedulers, sometimes you do need to use GA4. But if you can avoid it and just have your website conversion action set up directly through GTM rather than just through GA4. That's... That's a key one that I have noticed also a few times before.

The other one as well is enhanced. Dan: Just on, just on you're not saying not to do it, it's alright, you'd still do it and have it as a secondary. Harry Hughes: Yes, because it's always good to compare. Just do not have, ideally, don't have that as your own source of primary conversion actions.

If you do run J4, have it as a secondary to comparison. I would also be checking just to make sure that you're running enhanced conversions. Very, very simple. You can just hover over the conversion action and it'll pop up and it will show you enhanced conversion as a green tick or not.

Make sure that's a tick. ⁓ won't go over it too much, but enhanced conversions just mean that you're essentially gathering Dan: Yeah, yeah. Harry Hughes: more user data to feed back to the Google algorithm for every conversion action that you have. Just make sure that you are running enhanced conversions.

And also if you are in the EU, just make sure that you're using consent mode V2 as well. Again, you can see that in the same way you hover over the conversion action, it will show up as a green tick. Just make sure that both of those two are ticked, especially if you are running ads in the EU. That's really, really important.

And the final point when it comes to conversion tracking and the green flag that I'm always looking for is to see whether you're importing your offline actions. So any actions that are occurring in your CRM further down the funnel, I want to see that they're being imported straight back into your Google ad account. So we've mentioned this in other podcasts before, but HubSpot, for example, most CRMs now do, they have direct integration to Google ads. for example, is a great one because many of the customers that we work with use HubSpot.

⁓ we can import different contact lifecycle stages back into Google Ads as a primary conversion action. So for example, when a contact turns into an opportunity, an SQL or a customer, we then import those as conversion actions back into Google, which is basically our way of saying, hey Google, we want more of these because these people exist in our CRM, they're SQLs and onwards. These are more important, these are more valuable to us. please try and get more of those.

So offline conversion actions is also a huge green flag and something that we always try to implement where we can. Dan: Yeah and just one level deeper than that is assigning a value to those offline conversion imports. So if you can do this is from HubSpot you can assign a number value ⁓ an MQL or a number value to an SQL however you're actually going to just record these leads or opportunities however your company frames it and different number for each ⁓ and you can then do with that number as long as the ⁓ numbers accordingly.

to the platform ⁓ a target ROAS billing strategy to go towards that value over time and that then help you optimize towards them in an efficient way where you can use tROAS rather than just going for maybe max conversions, could find you as long as there's a strong enough difference between what an MQL is and an SQL as an example, you could optimize towards the SQL if the volume is there and you just do that with the t-ROWS bid strategy against that against ROWS target for the ⁓ SQL Just a little bit more detailed and a little bit more complicated, but it's really good the line once you have the volume.

Harry Hughes: Mm-hmm. Yes. and I think a point on that as well is that don't be afraid to run those as tests as well. You can always split test them out so you can have one that's running on max conversions and one that's running on a TCPA.

Run them both as a 50-50 split test experiment inside the experiment section of Google Ads. Dan: Two rows two rows. mean rather than two CPA or you can do you can do either at any point but yeah Harry Hughes: and test. Yeah, or either, sorry.

⁓ TCPA or TROS and run those as 50-50 split test. Do that for three months. I think that's usually the kind of the given period of time and see which one's more effective. something you can always do.

You don't have to choose just one or the other. If are unsure, just run an experiment. Before we into bidding strategies in more detail, we won't spend a huge amount of time on bidding strategies, but I guess we can ⁓ talk about a of the ways in which Minu run them. There are just a couple of core settings that I do always check.

No matter how well established an account is, I will always check to see that these are switched off in the correct way. So there's three settings that I look for. This is at the campaign level. So number one is your location.

So there's two options when it comes to your location settings. One is presence and interest and one is presence only. Always make sure that you are using presence only. The reason why is that if you have presence and interest, That essentially means that you're running ads just for people in the UK, if you're running presence and interest, if there's anybody that's Googled anything to do with the UK, and let's say they're based in America, then that's an interest in the UK.

So you're immediately opening, you're targeting two people outside of the UK. So just always make sure that you do have it switched on for presence only, unless of and there is a caveat to this, if you were running say, huge expo, a big trade show, and were trying to target people that are actually interested in ⁓ coming your country and they're not directly in your country, then that could be a time when you would use presence or interest only. But typically, I'm always using presence only.

The other setting ⁓ is your networks. So there's two options here. Again, this still in the campaign settings. When you open it up, you'll have two setting options here.

Number one is for your search network and the second one is display network. Again, they're just two tick boxes. Always make sure that you untick those. You do not want to be running on the search network and the display network.

Typically, whenever I've done this before, the volume of traffic is good, but the quality of traffic is very, poor. So always something that I switch off from the get-go. I always do the same in Facebook and in LinkedIn as well. I'm always disabling.

⁓ search partners or display partners. So I do that across the board with every channel that I run my ads in. And then just to touch on, before we can actually start to break out or break down, sorry, some of the systems and the ways in which we separate our campaigns and the structure of our ad accounts, which I guess is kind of ⁓ the important thing, it is important to quickly touch on bidding strategies. Again, Everyone has their own personal favorites or ways in which they would like to run them or there's different scenarios where people choose different bidding strategies.

often jumped into accounts where I see companies running max clicks. The behind max clicks tip or historically is that if you're a fresh account or you're ⁓ creating new campaign which has ⁓ limited available that you can run max clicks to basically quicken the learning It's not something that I truly believe in. I think that you're best off just focusing on one optimization point from the get-go, rather than running max clicks, say, for six weeks, and then changing to max conversions, because it will affect the you're running.

You will see a ⁓ stalling, a time in which the algorithm has to switch over and take time to learn again. So I personally, if we just run max conversions from the off, max conversions is my, primarily what I'm running across the majority of the campaigns that I work with. As Dan said, there are occasions when I will then move into TCPA or T-Rail OS accounts. That is a more complicated set up, but when we are pulling in values and the values aren't so dynamic, then that is a time when I would use T-Rail OS for example.

most of the time it's max conversions. If it's a brand campaign, I'm typically running those as search impression share or doing it as manual CPC. But typically when I've kind of split tested them out before, the search impression share has been the easiest to run and the have kind of been ⁓ negligible between both. So just for efficiency in terms of time spent in the account, search impression share often the most efficient campaign to run when it comes to brand, but manual CPC can also be effective.

It requires much more manual intervention, more regularly to make sure that you're not losing out on potential bids and you're always kind of achieving the impression that you're going after. Dan: Google will always push that you go on max conversions on that as well. do it because it's ⁓ easy option of saying they you're going to get the most conversions from this campaign and so they will say to you just run max conversions. I think that what I've seen in the past is you can do that but it costs you more so ⁓ if anything not cost beneficial to business and also if you think about it.

The whole point of a brand campaign is you want to be paying the lowest amount possible for people that are already searching for you. You don't want to be paying a lot of money, a lot of clicks on paying for a lot of clicks on terms that are your brand name that you've paid to build. Like you've already paid to build this brand for yourself, you've got this name, you shouldn't then be paying above and beyond to then convert someone on that name. If they go into Google and they're searching for you, the reality is they're already in the mindset of trying to convert, they're probably gonna convert with you, right?

So if you then go and use the logic of when you go for a generic campaign. you're trying to get Google to find people when they're searching for certain terms to actually convert with you or take an action on your site. You want to be finding people that are likely to convert, not just click and spend five seconds because they're a lower quality individual. But if someone's already looking for the brand, they've already gone past that stage because they already know who you are.

And so they already have like essentially conversion intent. So you don't need to be using a conversion based action to then that person because it's already essentially that heavy lifting is already done. So just that's typically a Google rep is will usually come to you and say run conversions. Again, if you want to do anything here, just split test the two.

The likelihood is Google. a few things. One, if you don't have any competition whatsoever, then realistically person would just go through through your organic. If you do have competition and you're defending your brand position.

then you want to keep the cost as low as possible. So do try search impression share on manual CPC and or split test that as an experiment against conversion. And you'll probably see ⁓ conversion bid strategy will be more expensive for you, but just something to be aware of as to why you're running it as manual CPC and search impression share. And why not just follow Google reps to say, ⁓ just run conversions.

Because they will typically tell you to do that. And I guess like just to finish on that, again, you're also splitting out likely pure brand, which would be like just your company name as an example, your core name and then expanded brand, which would be. It could be Mayfair Media Group reviews, it could be Media Group pricing comparison, it could be something like that, which would be expanded brand. can and hoover those too, if those sorts of terms are being competed against.

But it's down to discretion really, because you could argue that they might be getting swept up via Organic if you didn't compete for them. But if people are bidding on them, which... ⁓ Harry Hughes: Mm. Dan: they might not manually be bidding.

This is one of the things you'll often see is competitors might not be manually bidding. They might be using PMAX ⁓ PhraseMatch or AI Max. Yeah. And, and that will sweep up your, ⁓ lot of ⁓ terms.

So typically if you're running those campaigns now in Phrase or AI or PMAX, when you go and look at search insights, there will be a lot of company terms they're high intent terms. So you'll end up by default bidding against a lot of competitors. So then you Harry Hughes: or AI max. Dan: might go looking for your specific brand, seeing if there's anybody in the auction.

They usually will be and it's usually because of that they might not even know they're bidding on you. you are then kind of forced to do that. But it comes ⁓ to company discretion. If you're losing conversions to others in that auction and there's super aggressive bidding you kind of have to do it.

Harry Hughes: Yeah, it's you can tell the difference when you jump into auction insights. And if they are outbidding you, like if their top of page percentage or ⁓ share percentage is ⁓ higher than yours, then obviously they are actually ⁓ on your brand terms. But if it's kind of negligible, like it's relatively small amounts, then it's probably they're just doing it without actually realising. But that's something that you should always keep an eye on.

Dan: Mm-hmm. Harry Hughes: So I guess there's two things there to keep an eye on when it comes to running brand just whilst we're on it. So if we're running target impression share, I like to set it as absolute top of page, 90 % as the target. I try to kind of my gold standard when it comes to brand and non-brand for impression share.

So search impression share is one of the key metrics I like to look at. Now for brand, I'm always looking for ideally 80 to 90 % of search impression share for my brand campaigns. that's kind of the gold standard where I would like to be. then for non-brand, ideally around 40, 50 % upwards, or 40 % upwards is a good place to be.

At least that point you're covering ⁓ fair percentage of your market. If you have extended into AI max, for example, you're running broad match, ⁓ you can obviously expect that search impression share to be much lower. So they're the two things. Dan: Yeah, it goes without saying on that point, you're at that 40-50, if ⁓ got to the same equivalent, like the 80-90, ⁓ you are with brand, that's now, you're ⁓ dominating that generic term.

And you can then expand out either horizontally, or yeah, horizontally right into new terms, but you've really dominated that term if that's where you're at. Harry Hughes: Yep, yeah, absolutely. That's always a nice thing to see because that's when you can then start. For example, if you're using exact match and you're hitting up 40 to 50%, then you can go, okay, well, let's now try a couple of phrase match terms and we can gradually expand or find other ways to scale.

But usually you can then start to move from exact in the phrase, for example. So they're the kind of the key thing. They're the two search impression share metrics I'm focusing on. And with brand especially, it's then jumping into the auction insights to go, okay.

who is actually bidding on top of us and by much, how much do we therefore need to spend. So I'm checking for auction insights and search impression share when it comes to my branded campaigns. Cool, okay, so let's start to jump into of the structures and the way in which we like to ⁓ out our campaigns. Now I said when we first started this pod that I do believe the structure of your ad account does depend on ⁓ different factors.

It depends on how many geos that you run your business in. It depends on how many products slash services that you actually offer and run ⁓ and... how much difference there is between those products and services. And it also depends on the budgets that you're running as well.

So they're kind of, think, like the three core factors when it comes to deciding how I would ⁓ about setting out ⁓ Google account structure for a client. For example, if you're just running a If you have a singular service, let's say you're a SaaS business and it's just a singular service or wealth management and you've got a singular service that you want to focus on, then the way in which you split out your campaigns might be via geo or it might be via intent, for example. So one campaign, you have three campaigns split between intent.

One is high intent keywords, one is mid, one is low. That can be a way in which you can split out your ad account. And then obviously you have a brand campaign separately. And then maybe you might dabble in a display, a PMAX or a Demand Gen separately with a smaller budget.

if you have many, many geos and geographies that you're focusing in, let's say you want to spend more in one geo than another, or you anticipate that your CPAs are going to be higher in one geo, lower in another, then I would be anticipating to split out my campaigns via geography. Unless... it's kind of, unless you're happy with it all being blended into one, in which case then you can have it into one, but it just makes it very harder than scale via geo. then if you equally have a range of products or services, then I would be splitting out my campaigns based on those products and services, especially if ⁓ have different values.

And so there's one product or service, which is perhaps a core offering that we want to spend more on, dial up more. and then we have maybe two, three, four other service offerings which aren't so important and therefore will have a very different CPA, then I would have those separated into a different campaign somewhere else. So there isn't just a one size fits all when it comes to Google Ad account structure. It does depend on some of those factors.

In many, many accounts, I've run all of those in different formats and sometimes I will also test them. It very, very much depends on a... as a business world, what is it that you're trying to focus on? What is your core goal?

And then B, kind of all of those other factors that I just mentioned. Dan. Dan: So just on that, I guess for anybody that might be unaware as to why there's such a need to break out those campaigns, like it's hygiene standards normal for us to understand is if you had one campaign with say high intent keywords, problem aware keywords, so, ⁓ in demand. gen level, I suppose, and then also brand if they were all combined into one campaign, you're essentially going to have is Google pushing budget into your easiest converting terms.

So what you would see is ⁓ brand is hoovering up all of the budget going through that and then your demand gen motions just obviously. not getting any spend at all. that's the, it's a very obvious, very logical reason for it, under no circumstances should you be going into an account seeing all of those combined into one campaign. Harry Hughes: a very, very good point actually, one that I did want to which is a huge red flag for us jumping into account is to see brand existing as an ad group inside your non-brand campaign, if that makes sense.

So if you have a campaign that has generic search terms for your product service, and then you have your brand as an ad group inside that campaign, that is very much a big red flag. I will always, always advocate that you have your brand. separate from everything else that you're running and that you have all of the non-brand campaigns, make sure that you are running strict keyword exclusion lists for your brand in those campaigns and your campaign settings as well you can actually create like a brand list and you can add it and you can exclude it there so ⁓ I would excluding it in those two places.

Number one in your campaign settings and number two as a negative keyword list which contains all your brand terms. So there's those two that I would be using in your non-brand campaigns to make sure that you are not bidding on those brand terms. And it's the same way in which we operate our paid social ads. When we have our prospecting campaigns and our retargeting, we always want to make sure that we're excluding every possible customer list from the prospecting campaign because that campaign by its very nature is...

being used to prospect to an entirely new customer segment. And we want to try and achieve that same, if we can in Google Ads by excluding the brand keywords. So that's just one thing that I have seen a few times. So thanks for raising that point.

I guess ⁓ your point, Dan, well, which is, why we split them out in those ways in regards to hygiene. those that aren't aware or aren't that deep into Google Ads, unlike Meta, ⁓ you can allocate budget per ad group, you can't do that in Google Ads. You can only allocate budget per campaign. So if you have ⁓ campaign for your service and say you have four different products or four different service offerings that you want to run ads for and you run those all within that singular campaign, which is fine, especially if you're running on small budgets, because of the things that we always advocate is consolidation where possible.

If you can consolidate your accounts, we suggest that you do. The more learnings that you can have per campaign, the more effective and efficient those campaigns will be. So always push for consolidation where possible. But if you were to run four service offerings inside one single campaign, So let's say you've got ⁓ only campaign and inside this campaign you're running your four different service offerings as different ad groups.

So each ad group we run as ⁓ So I'm to think of a good example. Let's say one ad group is retirement planning. That is in the theme of that ad group. So all of the keywords in the ad group entirely relate to retirement planning and the ⁓ landing that it would send to is also the retirement planning ⁓ LP.

and then the ad obviously is entirely focused on retirement planning. So everything that you do from the ad group down should be thematic and it should be as specific as possible to those keywords. And again, it's another reason why we try to keep it as separated and as hygienic as possible because if you have everything lumped into a single ad group therefore you have, let's say, ⁓ different keywords for all your different service offerings, well, you can only then run you can send that traffic to one ad and that one ad, all your 15 different headlines is not going to be specific enough.

It's not going to be specific enough to warrant a high click through rate and to make that ad effective and efficient. So that's why we separate them out into ad groups and keep them thematic. But to my original point, you cannot control spend at the ad group level. So if you have one product or service, which is in its retirement planning and that's converting well.

Well, your other four ad groups or three ad groups aren't gonna receive any of the spend or bare minimum spend. So all of a sudden they're gonna be left behind in the dust. But your board wants to grow. pension fund for example but that's missing out so ⁓ order to scale that that needs to become its own campaign so you can actively allocate spend to that.

So that's why we separate things out at the campaign level it's based on a logic of do need to separate this out because there's going to be a difference in CPA because there's going to be a difference in spend and how we want to scale it. Dan: That, the way you, so you've just broken that out by service type, yeah. So that's good because you've just done two different services that you did. There was the first one and there was the pension fund.

Harry Hughes: retirement planning and pension funds. Dan: Yeah, so you've broken out two services because you said that if you include the two services within one campaign, service can get a lot of spend, the other can be ⁓ neglected. So ⁓ would advise them basically breaking out the individual services by the campaign ⁓ actually using the ad group, say for pension fund to be, you know, three different opportunities of people, of the way in which people search for pension fund.

And then you intercept with that the right word. to go in with each ad group. So to bring it back to give somebody listening another option, say one service, ⁓ say CRM platform and all you offer is that one individual CRM platform and you wanted to actually break out your campaigns via intent which think is a great great approach. You could essentially then you'd face the same issue if you try and group it up into one campaign and loads of ad groups.

You would find very quickly exactly what you've just said, one ad group getting a lot of spend. You may pick up a few conversions through some of the others if they get spend, but really one's going to dominate and you're forced to then break out others. But what you could do is actually go from a campaign intent per campaign. So you could go, I'll give an example of this.

You could have campaign, one of the campaigns being solution. intent that could be broken out of different ad groups and in those ad groups you could have something like CRM software for manufacturers. that's in obviously manufacturing is looking for a solution. ⁓ could have B2B CRM services attribution or something.

⁓ they look if you offer that it makes sense to show for that. You could also have somebody looking at it ⁓ as revenue ⁓ or you ⁓ company data platform. They could be three different ways that somebody could be looking for your service but they're looking for a solution to a problem that they have so you're looking at as you're looking to show for intercept solution and tank keywords you have one campaign with that. Campaign two could be action intent so this is somebody who's very bottom of funnel and they've probably already done a lot of comparative work.

and they might be in terms such as book demo or demo opportunity for CRM platforms. mean they're less likely to search this sort of thing but it's just an example of how you can do this. Or a quote for an attribution platform. Again you're less likely to search for these sorts of things but that's like...

⁓ somebody who's literally looking to compare say vendors and they're right at the point of taking action. they're quickly looking for who appears for those sorts of things. again, that's a bit of a different intent. And then there could be comparison is another example, which would be more of looking for ⁓ one above what I've just mentioned action.

And that could be something like best CRM platforms for enterprise ⁓ or alternatives to HubSpot. or I think of another major Salesforce alternative, something like that. ⁓ So got three different campaigns broken out there with three levels of intent. So the first one being solution intent, the other one being action, ⁓ and other being comparison.

And they sit at different stages of a user's journey. And it could be that campaign to action intent just doesn't work at all. So you can just scrap that. And it might be actually that solution intents really good for say a top of funnel play and then comparison intent is great for a bottom of funnel play.

And one might be a lot more expensive than the other. One might get people in more, more efficiently than the other, at least you've got them broken out. So that's just an example of how you can have one service broken out into three intent campaign types. So they will be generics.

so non-brand and they provide your business opportunity to scale out across those levels of intent which is a nice way to do it but like you've just said Harry if it's service based and the business goals are to scale out services you would do it differently. Harry Hughes: Yeah, agreed. Another, you kind of touched on it a little bit there, like when it comes to people looking for, let's say, hotspot alternatives, Monday CRM alternatives, those types of keywords or Monday CRM comparison, like, or Zapier versus NAN.

That's an example of ⁓ somebody searching for, so there's some intent there, but it's more comparable intent. I have seen previously ⁓ companies just blindly bidding on competitors without having an effective user And I think this is one of the red flags as well that I would see. people always up whether competitor campaigns are it. again, I don't think there's a one size fits all answer.

I do think it very much depends on the industry. Dan: Yeah. Harry Hughes: and the competitive landscape. I've seen them work very, very well.

I've also seen them work terribly. had one campaign, for example, where our competitor campaign outperformed ⁓ our kind generic search tenfold. And our generic campaign could not touch what our competitor campaign was doing. The key thing when you're going to run a competitor campaign is that you have a landing page that's suitable.

What I really dislike to see is a company running a competitor campaign. So Let's say you search monday.com their competitors ad appears at the top. You on it and it just takes them to their homepage.

You're just their traffic but you're not actually channeling that user to the right place. Well, they're just gonna land on it. And I've done this a number of times. I've landed and I'm like, well, hold on.

And this happens frequently now in So for If you're searching for Claude or Chachi Petit or Gemini Pro, you'll notice that there's probably three or four or five ads that appear first that all say Gemini or Claude and they all look like it would be the actual business, but it's not. It's only when you look at the URL and you're like, ⁓ shit, okay, that's actually not actual Claude that I'm looking for. And so you just land on their page and you're like, hold on, okay, this isn't it.

And you bounce immediately. That's typically what happens if you do not set your competitor campaigns up in the right way. So what you need to do is you need to have a comparison page set up or an alternative page. So for example, if you're a competitor to monday.

com and you're bidding on the monday.com keyword, then you need a landing page that when they land on it, it says monday.com versus us. then you can go on to explain in that LP why you are better.

or the pros and cons of you versus monday.com and try to call that out in the actual ad itself. There is no point in just sending traffic to your ad if it's just gonna bounce. You want it to be as qualified as possible.

And so that's why optimizing the ad towards the actual keyword and being upfront and honest about it, not just click baity, but being upfront and honest and call out that the fact that it is a comparison, the user lands, okay, so this isn't monday.com but. maybe I would be interested therefore in this company. So that's what I would do with competitor campaigns.

But again, like, ideally I would have it separated out just because the can be very, very different with and volatile with the competitor campaign. So I typically like to keep those separate so that it doesn't get in the way ⁓ of general search campaigns. Now keyword type. So there's obviously three different or four different types now that we can use.

So we have exact match, phrase match, broad match and now AI max. It's not really a keyword type, it's a campaign setting. Again, we did have a podcast previously on running AI Macs, so I highly suggest to go over and take a listen to that because we do touch on this. So I won't spend a long time on this.

But again, me, when it comes to choosing keyword type, ⁓ purely based off of logic. Okay, so ⁓ I mean by that is if you're in a business or an industry or your service offering has a ⁓ large ⁓ intent pool, so you have... hundreds of different potential search terms that someone could use to find your product or service, then you're more inclined to use something like phrase match, because there are many, many possible variants to find what it is that you do or different variations of a search term.

Insurance is often ⁓ a good example of that because are many, many different types of fraud, for example. So there are different types of fraud insurance terms that you could search to end up there. many examples I won't go into them, but that's when I would use phrase match. ⁓ if you have secured scale with your exact match, as we mentioned earlier, then you could use phrase to explore horizontally and try to scale that way.

I use exact match when the search term pool is low. So if there are not that many search terms that you can use to try to find your business and you're in a fairly tight niche, then I would typically start with exact match. because phrase is actually now much broader than what it used to be. It is very, broad.

You'll use phrase match and you'll be very, very surprised at some of the terms that appear in your search term ⁓ insights So exact match if you have a very tight or small or a niche search pool. Phrase, if it's wider, if it's bigger, and if it's massive or you're just now looking to scale up and test, then that's a chance when you can start to use broad. But just as a... heads up broad does go extremely broad.

In B2B I've not seen broad work that well and obviously AI Max as we mentioned ⁓ in one of our podcasts previously can be very very effective if you do have a large term of potential search terms to use. AI Max has been incredibly effective with some of our lead gen campaigns but that's more B2C lead gen than it is B2B. ⁓ That's kind of how I would approach keyword phrase type, ⁓ match types. And then I think it's just also worth touching ⁓ some of the, obviously everything that we've been kind of discussing here has been ⁓ campaigns and brand campaigns.

do think it's important to briefly touch on the other campaign types that are available. So obviously we have PMAX, DemandGen and DisplayCampaigns. In my honest opinion, I'm not the biggest fan of either of them. I've tested them, but not to great success.

I've often seen early success with the demand gen or a display campaign, but it often trails off over time. I do still use display and demand gen in some retargeting campaigns. Typically, that's where I would start rather than just going broad and perspective. I've seen them work quite well when it comes to retargeting.

PMAX is something that I... to use many, many ⁓ ago when I was working in e-comm, I haven't actually used it for the last couple of years purely because of the inability to exclude brand terminology and the lack of control that you had over PMAX. I do understand though that over the last few months that you can actually now have much, much tighter control over your PMAX campaign. So I'm actually now in the process of setting up a couple of experiments with the existing clients of running a 50-50 split test of Pmax versus generic search to see what the difference is.

Inherently, we've always seen much poorer of leads when you run Pmax. I've run Pmax in B2B before and the lead quality was absolutely abysmal. ⁓ And so we switched them off. So that's ⁓ historically been issue with Pmax, but...

Dan: Yeah. Harry Hughes: Now with some tighter controls being applicable to use, it is something that I'm now gonna potentially start to look at experimenting with and try again. So ⁓ hopefully be able to report back on PMAX again in the future. regarding gen and display and also PMAX, it is worth testing.

If you the budget and you have the creative and I think this is the real key, you need the correct creative, right? Especially if you're running demand gen, know, YouTube shorts, for example, as a... as an ad group in DemandGen, you need to have suitable creative to do that with. So if you've got suitable creative, you have suitable budget, then I do believe that it is worth testing.

Test a retargeting audience over there, test it against people that view the pricing page or maybe even just website, 60 day website viewers. Retargeting is often a good way to test. And if you see early traction, early signs of success, then perhaps try and then scale it out into a prospective campaign rather than just a retargeting. So that's typically how I approach those demand display and PMAX campaigns.

I'm not sure if you have any other thoughts on those additional campaign types now. Dan: think that if you're looking at them from a pure performance play, to your point, I don't know whether they the mold massively ⁓ I a bit of a bias there, maybe just from a media buying POV, but I would rather be running the equivalent of a display campaign on socials realistically because I just prefer the... Harry Hughes: So sure. Dan: I just, I prefer the thought of somebody seeing ⁓ their social platforms and engaging with them on social platforms than I do when on a website and they see it as a banner on the side of a site or that, know, where they, you know, where they show up on GDM or YouTube.

I think, I think YouTube you can be quite smart with. I've, like YouTube for prospective work and, also lead ⁓ gen, if it's the type of business. performance you can still get conversions from you know the right type of video showing against the right type of channels and right types of search terms so there's like an opportunity there but really you'd want to lean into the yet for me it would actually be that I would go to YouTube rather than those displays if I'm completely honest Harry Hughes: Yeah, and I think YouTube is a whole other topic, right?

That's not something that's... Dan: Oh, a million percent. Yeah, Exactly that. And it's like that obviously needs an entire different type of content as well.

If you're talking about YouTube, not just YouTube Shorts, YouTube Shorts is a quick, easy play. But if you've got UGC content on your social platforms, absolutely test that and throw that into 916. It should be in a 916 format. Throw it into YouTube Shorts and test that.

But if we're just keywords alone, it's like a whole, you know, like you've just mentioned there is a whole beast. So really nail that down. And then if you were to run... anything that is display oriented within Google, I would take more of a an awareness approach with it, opposed to be trying to tie it to lead gen.

If it is driving leads, which I do see, do see that on GDN. Have a look at what the quality is like on those. Harry Hughes: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Dan: in your CRM and what they look like and who's coming through on them. Maybe as a retargeting play, might serve a stronger purpose. Again, I've seen that, where you can retarget people, custom segments, and it works. but retargeting's a luxury.

Really, you wanna be capturing these people way in advance of that rather than like, I always think that with the, you know, the lower the AOV, the shorter buying cycle for retargeting is absolutely a luxury. Longer ACV, longer buying cycle, it becomes more of a necessity. ⁓ you're doing it and you test that in Google, would try display as retargeting, YouTube as retargeting, and before I would go to prospecting with it because I just don't trust how effective it is Harry Hughes: Mm-hmm.

Dan: at getting net new business, that generic high-intent keywords would be able to get you. Like we said earlier, if you can get 40 to 50 % impression share within those keywords and within those categories, that's got a stronger level of intent to you than maybe a GDN campaign as an example. Harry Hughes: Mm. Yeah, agreed.

Okay, cool. I think, look, we're coming up to time. kind of one of the final points I wanted to finish on because it is one of the frustrations I often see in a Google ad account is a lack of discipline in the search term insight report. So ⁓ of the things that I would often do when auditing an account is jump in and look at the 30 day search insight report for one campaign or many of the campaigns.

and just see how many irrelevant keywords are turning up in that search term insights. a few times I've jumped in and you see spend being allocated towards terms that are entirely irrelevant to the actual business and to the keywords. So just being disciplined with your negative keywords strategy, having a very hygienic clean separated list out. So for example, have a competitor negative keyword list where whenever competitive terms turn up, add those to your negative keyword list and keep those separate.

The reason why you do that is because inevitably when you do run different campaigns, you can choose which key, which keyword list you want to exclude. If you just have them all into one, it makes it very, complicated and much harder to exercise strict control over your campaigns and to be more accurate. So clean, next keyword lists and keep on top and be hygienic ⁓ with search term insights report. That's just one of the other things that I wanted to.

I wanted to call out. ⁓ ⁓ it absolutely is. Dan: Yeah, negative keywords is like a whole discussion as well. But it's like we're assuming that assuming that people know how to run those and are applying them, but applying them in the right ways is so important.

Harry Hughes: It is agreed. I mean, look, there's a few other things you can do inside Google Ads. I've done them. I wouldn't say I've necessarily seen massive impactful changes from that.

A good example, day parting in of our biggest spending campaigns, I've run day parting analysis and then applied the effects of that day parting ⁓ to ad account. I've been, I've tried that, I've tested it. And if I'm honest, results have been pretty minimal. So you can try something like day partying if you're in a very established high spending campaign.

That's something that you might want to look into. it sometimes is over complicating it, especially if your account isn't of a suitable size for it. But have a look, Google it, explore it I have run it, but I haven't seen huge impactful results from running it. But I think people can overcomplicate Google ads.

⁓ Most of again, is logic. And the structure is certainly logic. It's just thinking how ⁓ I need to set this up so that I can control the spend or where do I need to control the spend? Do I need to control it on product, on geo or intent?

And ⁓ starts to then build out the type of campaigns and the structure of the campaigns that you want to run. But I think we're pretty good to wrap up there, Dan, unless you've got anything else ⁓ to on. I think that's a pretty good introduction to how we like to structure our Google Ad accounts. Dan: Yeah, absolutely.

think we can in the future, we can go through a few examples of that name in brands, but we can just run through some examples of setups that are live. Cool. Harry Hughes: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Okay, awesome. Well, thanks as always for your time, Dan. I look forward to catching up next week. Cheers.

Dan: Cheers, bro.