Ads
Different types! Search has text ads, responsive search ads, call-only ads, and lots of extensions. It’s a text-based adventure!
Display has traditional image ads, responsive display ads, text ads, all sorts of neat stuff.
Video
If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine what getting multiplied by lots of frames. LINK TO VIDEO STRATEGY (delivering the payload in the first 5 seconds).
Learn about the evils of stock imagery.
Would you want to see stock imagery of Mexican food in ads for a Mexican restaurant? I wouldn’t. I want to see imagery of that restaurant’s actual offerings, not some ‘close enough’ stock photo of a burrito. Imagine the supremely negative user experience of leading people to believe that they can eat the food they see in a stock image, only to arrive at the restaurant and learn that that food isn’t on the menu.
Too often, restaurants don’t have many photos on their websites. And even on their menus, it’s rare that all food options will have photos. Yet, these restaurants make food pretty regularly. The solution is simple: whip out a camera and take some photos. A smartphone camera is more than enough for the vast majority of these situations, but the better the camera, the better the final result.
So if our Mexican restaurant wants to get more customers for dinner, I would ask them for photos that are actually representative of their dinner offerings. I would want the photos of the food to look exactly like the food will look when it arrives at the customer’s table. I completely recommend against dressing the food up in any way. We’ve all seen commercials for burgers from certain very popular fast food chains. The burgers in these commercials are a work of art; perfect in every possible way. But the burger you actually receive at the “restaurant” almost certainly looks like a disheveled wreck by comparison. As a consumer, how do you feel when you are lead to believe that you’ll eat something that looks great, only to eat something that looks awful? The customer experience is sub-optimal, to say the least.
Don’t do this. Insist that the photos you use in your ads actually depict what is being sold. Chances are, however the cook normally makes a carne asada burrito plate is perfectly acceptable for use in display ads.
Most of the time, these images are going to be shown in itty-bitty ad units. So if you see these ads on a computer, you won’t be able to zoom in or see much of the image anyway. And nowadays, most ads are shown on smartphones than computers or tablets, so the amount of screen real estate is even smaller and harder to see. Perfect is the enemy of the good here: don’t overthink it.
To get more people interested in eating at this Mexican restaurant, I would ask for photos of their most popular dinner options. I make sure to explain that I don’t want these photos to be “dressed up” or in any way depict something that people cannot buy at that restaurant. Don’t add garnishes that won’t be on the plate when the customer receives their dinner.
The imagery is just part of the display ad unit. We also have to have some sort of branding and ad text. People use their existing logo the vast majority of the time, but I’ve also seen advertisers just type out the name of the business if the logo isn’t transparent or otherwise easily usable in display ads.
Ad text is less straightforward. You might have space for a headline, a description, and a call-to-action. You might not. With display ads, less is more. Let the imagery do most of the talking, and highlight the most salient pieces of information in the ad text.
Google Ads has really pushed Responsive Display Ads (RDAs) as of late. Each RDA has slots for images, headlines, descriptions and calls-to-action. You can choose or upload quite a few options for each of these, and then Google’s machine learning decides which permutation of an image, headline, description, and call-to-action to use to ‘build’ the ad unit in a way that, when displayed to a user, is most likely to give Google money (AKA get clicked).
At first, my inner control freak recoiled at the thought of Google deciding these things. I had always recommended lovingly hand-built image ads for my clients. But, it takes a while to build display ads in the most commonly-used 8 or so sizes that reach the vast majority of ad slots on the GDN. There are a TON of irregular ad unit sizes that are scattered across the GDN. Google realized that those were hard to fill with display ads (unless you were using text ads). So they created RDAs, which can morph into any ad unit shape or size in existence.
Let’s say we want to create a RDA to get more people interested in eating dinner at this Mexican restaurant. First step: imagery. You can select up to TEN???? Images per RDA. I would ask for their top 10 – 20 photos of their dinner offerings. I would then pore over them, imagine how each would look in the ad unit when paired with the ad text I’m going to write, and pick the top TEN???? To upload as my images. Once the images have been uploaded, they then have to be cropped into squares or whatever aspect ratio(s) Google wants you to use. After cropping the images accordingly, I’ll write out some headlines and descriptions and choose a call-to-action. After you’ve saved the RDA, you’ll get the opportunity to see examples of how it could show in all sorts of ad units.
The same process applies to most other advertisers. Yes, I understand that you don’t have any good imagery to use in display ads. Go get some! It’s really not that difficult to take decent photos with a smartphone.
Ads
There are many different types of ads, and they’re all tools in the toolbox. For search ads, I tend to make responsive search ads and/or expanded text ads. For display ads, I tend to make responsive display ads, but I’m always happy to use ‘regular’ image ads whenever my clients send me some. But in my experience, the more someone has to work to make image ads, the less likely I am to receive them. And Google is very much tilting things in its own favor with how much it’s pushing and serving responsive display ads. So I like making as many responsive display ads as I think I can, as long as I’m very happy with all their constituent headlines and descriptions and images and such.
The PPC ad engine is the gatling gun, and the PPC marketer has to make sure the engine never runs out of rounds. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of clients with display ad strategies that can best be described as ‘anemic’.They’ll have 6 - 8 ‘regular’ image ads in the most common sizes with a general brand message and picture and logo. These are good to have, but too many people stop there, and you shouldn’t! Give that gatling gun more rounds! Make lots of ads.
Explain my strategy for making a variety of evergreen image ads using the same templated format, where a designer can swap out the background photo and get the benefit of a wide variety of creatives without reinventing the wheel each time.
Creating image ads doesn’t have to be an ordeal. I always recommend having a wide variety of ‘evergreen’ ads. Evergreen means it’s always going to be relevant, and doesn’t have to be paused due to some issue of time. For example, if you create some ads around a holiday or another ‘flighted’ promotion, those ads will have to be paused after the event passes. This inherently causes several inefficiencies, and is only worth doing if the value of having those ads outweighs the inefficiencies.
The Inefficiencies
First, the ads have to be created. Then they have to be paused when the event is over. If you’re going to pause them manually during a time that’s convenient for you, the only real inconvenience is having to set a reminder or something so you don’t forget to pause them. But what if it’s at an inconvenient time? Many times, clients have sent me image ads and asked that they be paused at midnight on such and such day. I used to believe that automated rules would function as intended 100% of the time, but I’ve been bewildered a few times when my automated rules didn’t pause ads when they were supposed to for reasons I still can’t identify. So I started setting reminders for me to personally verify that the automated rules had paused those ads. Hopefully this is just a fluke, but if you’ve been around Google Ads long enough, you have almost certainly seen some shenanigans that you can’t explain.
*A brief sidebar on AdWords bullshit*
Then there’s the question of whether or not those ads will even be served enough to ‘move the needle’ on performance. If you already have a bunch of ads that have been running for a while and are performing well, there’s a good chance that the new flighted ads may not perform as well, and therefore Google may not serve them “enough” because they’re not as good at making google more money. If your existing ads get the majority of that ad group’s impressions, were the flighted ads worth the effort?
If you really want those flighted ads to serve vigorously, your best bet is to pause their fellow ads in those ad groups. This presents its own problems, particularly if the ads being paused have been driving solid results. The question becomes: do the results of the flighted ads outweigh the opportunity cost of pausing ads that reliably work?
Making lots of good ads without spending lots of good time
We’re trying to create a customer experience that is basically the opposite of this scenario:
You’re going about your day browsing the internet, and you see it out of the corner of your eye: THAT ad. The one that you’ve been seeing for weeks, maybe months. You don’t even need to look directly at it to recognize it with your peripheral vision. Chances are this has happened to you. How did you feel about continuing to see that ad? How did you feel about the brand that kept bashing you over the head with it? Did it make you more or less likely to want to give them your money?
As is the case with so many things, the best image ads are lovingly hand-built. But that takes valuable time. I have encouraged many designers to ‘templatize’ their ad creation habits to make it easier to make a larger variety of high-quality ads than they normally would given the time and budget constraints. For example, let’s say you’re designing 8 ads in the most common Google Display Network placement sizes. Can you design them in such a way that the background image can be replaced in a way that doesn’t reduce the legibility of the text? I often encourage ad designers to make a set of image ads that they’re very proud of, and then swap out the image for another one, and keep everything else the same if possible. Many image ads have an image taking up most or all of theri real estate. If this image is replaced, the ‘look’ of the ad will be substantially different, even though the layout and formatting is identical. Most designers I know work in one of a few prominent image manipulation programs, and those make it easier to swap out the image and re-export that ad in those 8 sizes.
Don’t lose sight of the end goal: providing a positive customer experience. Generate enough ad creative variety that users won’t be able to identify the ads out of the corners of their eyes.
Evergreen ads, and not screwing up what’s working all the time
Chances are you’re going to have a sale or promotion or something, and your first instinct will be to change all the search ads to reflect this. You certainly could do that. But any edit to ad headlines or descriptions will throw a wrench in the machine. If your ads are working great, don’t screw them up. Instead, get this information into the ad UNIT without putting it into the AD ITSELF by using sitelinks, promotion and callout extensions. These won’t fuck up your ads themselves, and they can be scheduled to run at certain dates. Seeing as ads go through a review process (even though it’s normally basically instant), you can avoid any approval shenanigans when you first change them and then when you change them after the sale ends.
If you want to REALLY get a message out there, search ads are not the place to do it. Display is the solution.
Think of an insurance company. Do their offerings honestly change that much? No. What was true 10 years ago is true today. Yes, the specifics change, but the general brand message does not. What is your brand message? What can you write in your ads that was true 10 years ago and is true today and will be true 10 years from now?
Explain how I weigh what to put in headlines vs descriptions, and how I choose photos that I think can work well with any given combination. Explain how I crop images in the different aspect ratios, selecting the right logo version, all that good stuff.
I try to put myself in the shoes of the buyer and figure out what research they need to do before moving forward with their purchase. Imagine you just searched ‘guitars for sale’ and are faced with a sea of paid and organic search results. Chances are, you can buy lots of guitars from every one of those listings. It’s unlikely that your client can undercut the competition on pricing. Any of these could be a viable option, so how do you choose? Consider making your ads more helpful than everyone else’s. Hold the potential buyer’s hand and lead them to the promised land. What do they need to know that you can help advise them on?
Make that ad unit genuinely useful. Perhaps the client has enough information about their various acoustic guitars that they can assemble a buyer’s guide, which has a good chance of attracting the potentially-overwhelmed prospective buyer. Or, the ad unit could explain that this client offers a variety of acoustic guitars for sale, and that calling or coming into the shop can help connect the prospective buyer with some advice.
Being genuinely useful isn’t limited to an initial interaction with a search ad. Display retargeting is a fantastic way to help ‘nurture’ prospective customers over time in such a way that, if or when they finally are ready to convert, you are already positioned as a previously-helpful source of information. In the case of the guitar seller, I would try to devise a customer journey in retargeting display ads. List out all the various reasons why someone would ever buy a guitar from this client. Evergreen reasons are best, but any time-sensitive or price-related reasons are nice to have too. Acquire some imagery from that client that portrays these offerings, and mix and match the imagery and text to get a bunch of ads. Here’s an example of reasons why anyone would want to buy from Guillermo’s Guitars:
-Family-owned and operated
-You can get advice from someone that’s been doing this for a while
-If you go to their physical location, you can try before you buy (unlike online-only retailers)
-etc etc
Each of these selling points could easily be turned into a ‘set’ of image ads. Then you can show these ads to people (with very conservative frequency caps so as to not annoy them) for a while after they’ve visited your website.
You may not think that being family-owned and operated means much, but many resellers often carry the same product online. A lot of people are willing to consider patronizing a small family business rather than some store with dozens of locations or a faceless online retailer that might just be dropshipping its products. The aim here is to convey as many good reasons as possible to CONSIDER Guillermo’s Guitars over the competition. Each of those reasons might not be worth much alone, but they could have a significant cumulative impact.
Note that a more general, categorical search like ‘acoustic guitars for sale’ is much less specific than ‘Taylor 214 acoustic guitar for sale’. The first searcher probably has yet to identify what specific guitar they’re looking for, whereas the latter has a make and model picked out. So general, helpful ads that work for a more general search probably won’t be suited for the specific search. As with everything else in digital marketing, try to weigh all the different considerations individually and don’t follow any advice blindly, as there will always be exceptions.
I know of some people that only ever run flighted ads
Responsive Ads, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Experiment
Responsive search ads
Explain how I pin headlines
Headline 1 should be what I always want to show first
Explain pinning multiple things to position 2 or 3, or not pinning at all
Explain descriptions, how description 1 is most likely to serve and should contain the thesis, and description 2 should be written so it could stand alone, but most of the time will support description 1.
What ads should be in each ad group? I tend to put the exact same ads in each ad group. A mix of general ‘evergreen’ ads are probably fine to put in all display prospecting ad groups, but the more niche your product or service or targeting method is, the more your ads should be differentiated.
Make a screenshot of a display campaign and ad groups, all named accordingly. Then compare that with a vague campaign name and ad groups. ‘Audiences’, ‘topics’.....what’s in there? Could be anything. Compare that to ad groups named after exactly what they’re targeting.
Back to account structure. In the same way that you want to keep display prospecting and display retargeting separate, you’ll want to keep branded search and non-brand search separate. If I’m going to bid on branded terms, I’m probably going to want to max those out. So I want to give branded search more than enough budget for the average day. Keep in mind that Google can 2x your budget on any given day, it doesn’t need to be way higher. As much as I like the maximize conversions bid strategy, I tend to find that it leads to unnecessarily high CPCs on branded search clicks. So I tend to make either a portfolio target CPA strategy just for that branded search campaign (so I can set a <$1 CPC cap) or use maximize clicks and also set a CPC cap. It also depends on what people intend to do from searching for your brand name.
I want to make portfolio bid strategies separately for branded and non-brand strategies.
Why use customer match when you can use retargeting pixels to the same effect, without all the onerous restrictions?
How to make retargeting audiences
Dynamic or ‘regular’
Adwords pixel or GA pixel?
Combinations > URL contains ‘something evergreen’ that fits the site hierarchy
Remember to make exclusions too!
Can you exclude your current customers? If so, should they be excluded from all campaigns, or just some?