Article11 Hidden Google Ads Gems
I’ve spent much of the past month traveling to conferences all over the place – from Berlin to Las Vegas, with quite a few stops in between. Throughout those travels, I’ve maintained a running list of questions session attendees and event acquaintances have asked (when you write a weekly newsletter, you need to source ideas from somewhere).
The question I’ve gotten over and over again – primarily from senior-level marketers – was a variant of this: “We spend so much of our budget on Google Ads, but it feels like we’re not taking advantage of everything it has to offer. What else is there? What other features can help us gain an edge?”
This week’s issue is dedicated to that question, with a twist: I’ve tried to blend the strategic and tactical when explaining each feature – so whether you’re a hands-on-keyboard person, or a marketing leader looking to ask the right questions, there’s something in here for you. So without further ado, let’s dive in:
Account-Level Access
1. Portfolio Bidding Strategies
One of the major pain points I see across lead generation + eCommerce accounts is blowup CPCs. Not only is a CPC that is 10x, 20x or even 50x your median CPC horrid for efficiency, but they also represent a very real opportunity loss: if your ads stop running, you’re not there when other potential customers/clients are searching later in the day.
Blowup CPCs happen in just about every account using Smart Bidding, and are often obfuscated by Google Ads aggregated reporting; they are particularly common in accounts where there is massive variance different advertising brands – think: home services, SaaS, finance, home goods, fashion, jewelry, senior care, residential real estate, etc. These blow-ups are caused (typically) when Google Ads makes an incorrect expected value calculation.
Fortunately, there is a way to prevent those: Portfolio Bidding Strategies. These work in an identical fashion to your standard bidding strategies, with the added ability to set a maximum CPC. I typically recommend setting the maximum bid at: [upper bound of your target Cost Per Acquisition] * [90th Percentile CVR]. So, if the most you’re willing to pay for a customer is $500, and the top-end of your CVR is 20.0%, then you’d set the max CPC bid at $100.00.
Using portfolio strategies will effectively prevent blow-up CPCs, while enabling your campaign to capture the overwhelming majority of potential clients. If you’re not using them, I highly recommend doing so; if you’re not sure, ask! A well-designed portfolio strategy can save thousands of dollars a month.
2. Custom Goals (Formerly: Conversion Action Sets)
The vast majority of Google Ads campaigns (75%+) have multiple primary conversion actions – whether that’s a demo request, form submission, phone call, platform registration, purchase, etc. For accounts with multiple campaigns and conversion actions, the challenge is ensuring the correct primary and secondary conversions are attached to the correct campaigns; this gets even more complicated when running multiple different campaign types (i.e. Demand Gen, Display, Search & Shopping/PMAX), each of which might have a different objective. Tack on Google’s occasional willingness to “auto-create” goals for an account, and you have a migraine waiting to happen.
Custom Goals are an advanced feature that simplifies this dramatically; instead of having to rely on either (a) manually adding the right conversions to each campaign, then updating them each time you make a change or (b) using a default / “standard” goal set (i.e. Leads, Purchases, etc.), you can create your own set of conversion actions, from any conversion in the account. You can then add the custom goal set to any campaign, and any subsequent changes to it will be automatically made to each campaign where it’s used.
This is the easiest way I’ve found to manage more complex accounts, as well as to ensure that only the actions you want counted as conversions are included in your campaign’s reporting + optimization.
3. Enhanced + Offline Conversions
I’ve written extensively about Enhanced + Offline Conversions in previous newsletters, but it bears repeating here. According to Optmyzr’s data of over 30,000 accounts, only 13% – 1 in 8 accounts linked to Optmyzr (a sample which skews highly advanced) – is taking advantage of these mission-critical features.
For those unfamiliar (and who don’t want to read that massive newsletter linked above), here are the cliff notes:
- Enhanced Conversions: this enables advertisers to pass Google (and Meta, via the Conversions API) additional zero-party data captured during the conversion. This data is used to better match the conversion with the actual individual who completed it, improving conversion measurement and enhancing future targeting efforts.
- Offline Conversions: this is a broad set of conversion adjustments + augmentation that enables advertisers to either (a) better inform Google which online actions resulted in positive offline outcomes (i.e. a qualified lead, a SQL, a phone call sale, etc.) and/or (b) adjust the value of an online conversion based on subsequent events (like an upsell, return or fraudulent transaction).
These two tactics are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are complementary. The combination of Enhanced + Offline Conversions is more powerful than using either individually. Once they have been set up, you can add your offline conversions as primary optimization events in Google Ads – allowing you to bid for the thing(s) that are as close to your organization’s business objectives as possible. This also has the positive side effect of dramatically reducing spam/invalid/poor-quality leads, as Google’s algorithm quickly identifies the patterns present in users submitting low-quality leads and stops showing your ads for future searches exhibiting those same behavioral patterns. The end result: you get better leads and a more transparent, accurate measurement of performance relative to the outcome you actually want.
If you’re interested in learning more about enhanced + offline conversions, I’d highly recommend you check out this issue, where I provide an in-depth review of both features, as well as how to implement them.
4. Brand Lists
An increasingly common complaint I’ve heard from PPC professionals is that Google’s relentless march toward broad match (and overhaul of match types) has resulted in their ads serving for competitor + alternative branded terms. Unsurprisingly, these searches tend to have lower conversion rates and higher costs – thus resulting in wasted spend (not to mention, potential issues and branded cost increases, with competitors responding in-kind).
The typical response to these issues is to add competitor/alternative/non-relevant brands to a negative keyword list, then apply said list to each campaign. Unfortunately, this gets both staggeringly complicated to manage (since Google seems to apply different standards to keyword match types vs. negative match types), and it often results in misspellings, variants and foreign spellings of other brands slipping through.
The solution to this is Brand Lists. Unlike negative keywords, brand lists associate all variants of a given brand (defined as an organization, product, good or service) with a single inclusion – so you don’t need to worry about excluding every possible way a random person could spell that brand.
These are part of the Shared Library in Google Ads, and can be used in two ways:
- Restrict Search Ads to Only Brands on the List – the first option you have is to restrict your search campaigns to serve ONLY for queries that match your keywords AND contain a brand, product or service from your brand list. This is fabulous for conquesting or capitalizing on searches for key competitors. It will throttle your search volume, and must be used in conjunction with automated bidding + broad match – but in the right contexts, it’s extraordinarily powerful.
- Exclude Brands from PMAX Campaigns – the more common use-case is to exclude brands from your Performance Max campaigns. This will prevent your PMAX ads from serving on specific brands on Search + Shopping inventory. This can be used either (a) to funnel your own branded traffic to designated campaigns (by excluding your own brand from PMAX), (b) to ensure that your products don’t serve against irrelevant competitors, and/or (c) to avoid highly competitive SERPs where you have multiple affiliates already advertising. If you are an affiliate, you can use brand exclusions to ensure your ads don’t serve on SERPs where partners have requested you not advertise (for instance, their branded terms).
Brand Lists are a relatively new and niche feature, but it is worth spending time to build them out; while I don’t have a crystal ball, I am confident that Google will continue to expand their functionality and applicability to other campaign types.
Pro Tip: if a brand you want to exclude or advertise against is NOT found in the brand exclusions interface, you can actually add it using their “Request A Brand” feature in the drop-down. Response times are a tad bit slow (~2-8 weeks in my experience), underscoring why I think getting a head start on this is critical, especially as we get close to BFCM.
To learn more about Brand Lists, check out this resource from Google.
5. Campaign Groups + Performance Targets
Managing Google Accounts with dozens (or hundreds) of campaigns is a daunting task. It’s even more difficult when campaigns are grouped geographically or by product/service line. Not only does this create reporting headaches, it also makes getting a clear picture of how a given set of campaigns are performing extraordinarily difficult.
If that sounds like your account, there are two related features that can help: (1) Campaign Groups and (2) Performance Targets.
Campaign Groups – this is exactly what it sounds like: a group of campaigns that share a similar characteristic – whether that’s the service they are advertising or the geography in which they are serving, or something else entirely. Campaign Groups enable you to aggregate the performance of all included campaigns into a single screen, which dramatically simplifies top-level reporting. It will not substitute for diving into those individual campaigns and ad groups to see what’s driving the performance, but it will make your top-level, executive reporting easier and more consistent.
Performance Targets – Knowing how your campaigns are performing is nice; contextualizing that performance relative to your goals is nicer. That’s exactly what performance targets do: they enable you to set targets for clicks, conversions, budget, CPA and/or CPC, and measure your campaign group’s performance relative to those targets. The Performance Targets dashboard also includes expected performance by end of period (week, month, year), so you can check in real-time your progress relative to expectation. For a senior-level marketer, this is absolute gold – no more quick math to figure out if you’re on- or off-target for each campaign group, no more continually emailing your agency partner to see how things are going.
From an agency perspective, Performance Targets are amazing – you can see where campaign performance is vs. expectation, as well as the underlying drivers of that performance. That enables real, results-driven conversations with clients, more engaged stakeholders and less death by powerpoint.
You can read about campaign groups + performance targets here.
6. Custom Segments + Combined Segments
We all know that search is inexorably marching toward a DSP-like future; keywords are becoming less targeted and less relevant, while audiences and data are becoming ever-more-critical to success.
The challenge with audiences, at least historically, is that there are only so many Google-supported audiences (in-market vs. affinity), and those audiences are both non-transparent (i.e. what really goes into “Home and Garden” or “Travel Buffs”) and non-differentiated. To gain a true advantage using audiences, you need to target the precise groups of people that are relevant to YOUR organization.
That’s where Custom Segments + Combined Segments come in.
Custom Segments: Custom segments enable you to reach your ideal target audience by providing Google with a list of relevant keywords, URLs and/or Apps that said audience is likely to search, use, or be interested in. These can be used in Display, Discovery, Gmail & Video campaigns at present.
Custom Segments are found in the “Shared Library” and come in three flavors:
- Search Keywords: you can show ads to people with specific interests or purchase intentions (default) OR to people who have searched on Google Properties for those keywords (note: this only works for campaigns running on Google Properties, like YouTube and Demand Gen; if a custom segment using search behavior is added to a Display campaign, it will be shifted to interests or purchase intentions). Used properly, these can be extremely powerful – consider adding hyper-specific + expensive keywords, problems/challenges, or competitor brands, then adding those lists to your Demand Gen campaign. This can enable you to cost-effectively reach your ideal users at a fraction of the cost of traditional search ads – just make sure you have a capture mechanism.
- URLs: enter URLs that your competitor might visit; Google will then serve ads to users who visit that URL, or URLs similar to the inputted ones. Consider experimenting with hyper-specific URLs, like log-in portals, aggregator sites, thank-you pages and/or paid media landing pages, as these can provide higher-quality traffic. It is worth mentioning, since there is a LOT of confusion around this, that (1) this does NOT mean that your ads will reach ONLY people who visited those specific URLs or (2) that your ads will appear on the included URLs. But again, this is a great way to help Google hone in on your desired outcomes.
- App Users: finally, you can target people who use apps similar to the ones you’ve added. This works similarly to the URL-based targeting. Consider including retailer apps, banking apps, industry-specific apps, etc. Once again, your ads will reach people who include and are similar to people who download and/or use the apps included in the list.
Combined Segments are one of my absolute favorite features in Google Ads – and (unfortunately) one of the least-used in accounts I’ve reviewed. At a very high level, combined segments allow advertisers to effectively create “interest stack” audiences, with intersecting attributes (i.e. in-market, affinity, your data, demographics, etc.). This exponentially increases the potential relevance for your audience targeting, allowing you to go from “same-as-everyone-else” to “hyper-relevant-to-your-organization”.
In addition to enabling you to layer different audiences together, Combined Segments also enable you to exclude segments + data – helping you weed out irrelevant users.
For instance, if you wanted to target net-new high-end homeowners who like yoga, you could build a combined audience segment with the following:
- Is a Homeowner
- Exhibits High-End Consumption Habits (i.e. First/Business class travel, 5* hotels, drives a high-end car, etc.)
- Is in-market for Yoga Classes or Equipment
- Is NOT a current customer
All via a single combined audience segment. These can be added directly into your search campaigns, allowing you to see performance by various buyer persona (observe) or target only users matching your combined audience criteria (target + bid).
7. Campaign Management
Rules – Rules are one of the most endlessly flexible ways to manage your ad account; they can be used for just about anything you can imagine. At their core, Rules are glorified “if-then” conditionals, which can be used to help streamline your management, avoid overspending, schedule or edit ads, and so much more.
A few common use cases for rules:
- Stop Loss – if a given keyword/ad group/campaign has spent a specific amount (i.e., 5x your Target CPA) without a conversion or at an exceptionally high cost, automatically pause that keyword/ad group/campaign and send you (the manager) an email. This will allow you to troubleshoot the issue, while preventing the underlying component from costing any more money.
- Promotion Management – you can schedule and/or pause any campaign at any time – for instance, you could pause all ads that are tagged “Fall 2023 Promotion” exactly when the sale stops – preventing them from serving after the event is over.
- Manage Keywords or Ads – you can increase bids/tCPA (or lower tROAS) for high-performing keywords, pause low-performing ads/keywords, etc.
- Check Budgets – you can schedule emails to be sent when you reach 100% (or any percentage) of your daily budget, enabling you to make an informed decision whether or not to increase that budget. Especially during sales or other short-term events, you may want to increase your budget in order to continue serving ads, but not want to permanently increase said budget; you can do exactly that with rules.
At the end of the day, Rules are incredibly powerful. They can do just about anything inside a Google Ads account. Deployed properly, they will save thousands (or more) in wasted spend, streamline operations and help you stay on top of even the most complex ad accounts.
8: Seasonality Adjustments
Seasonality Adjustments are a niche, advanced tool that is woefully underutilized by most PPCers. At its core, Seasonality Adjustments is a way for you (the advertiser) to communicate expected changes in conversion rate. This could be seasonal, but it could also be a result of any other short-term disruption (i.e. massive out-of-stock; shipping delays; sales/promotions; etc.). These tend to work best for shorter periods of time (i.e. less than 14 days), but that’s a guideline, not a rule. I’ve seen seasonality adjustments work brilliantly well for 60+ days in some accounts.
The crux of how these work is pretty simple: the seasonality adjustment overrides smart bidding’s default conversion expectation, thereby throttling (up or down) your bids in the auction during the time of the scheduled adjustment. This prevents your account from missing out (or overbidding!) at the outset of the seasonality adjustment, as well as from overbidding (or missing out!) at the conclusion of the adjustment. Used correctly, these can be absolute game-changers around certain promotions, events, etc.
9. Experiments
I will never understand why more Google Ads Accounts don’t use Experiments. They are, hands down, one of the most powerful tactics marketers have for uncovering opportunities within their ad account, and one of the most defensible ways to optimize an account.
Experiments function exactly like you’d expect: create an experiment, select one (or more) metrics that you are hoping to optimize, pick a “control” campaign, make some changes to that campaign (i.e. bidding, keywords, ads, audiences, geotargets, etc.), then publish the experiment. Google allows you to pick a control vs. experimental split (so you can still send 80% of your traffic to the control campaign, while testing the experiment on the remaining 20% – or do a 50/50 split, or anything else your heart desires), along with how that split is created (user-based or search-based) and how long the experiment will last (from a day to a month to a year).
The experiments dashboard will track the performance of your experiment vs. control in real-time, and alert you when statistically-significant changes to your targeted metrics occur.
No more guessing whether a tCPA or tROAS bidding strategy works best. Just experiment. Not sure which PMAX Audience Segment works best? Want to A/B test different display ad creatives?
Experiments are stupidly powerful.
10. Value Rules
I’d be remiss if I didn’t include Value Rules among the “incredibly powerful and massively under-utilized” tactics for Google Ads. While they’ve been out for awhile (since ~2019), adoption is persistently low (<5%) – but that’s largely due to people not understanding how they work (itself a topic for another newsletter).
At their core, Value Rules are a mechanism by which you can adjust the expected conversion value, typically using your own business data. How? Well, most PPCers (and most executives) know a LOT more about their customers and their business than Google does.
For instance, if you know that people who are in a certain geographic location, or audience, or have a certain device tend to be worth more (or less) to your business than the average, you can set a value rule. This will automatically modify the value of the conversion (which, in turn, will modify your bid across your campaigns). While this isn’t as precise as offline conversions, it is much easier to implement – and for larger-scale patterns, it can be comparably effective. Value rules work by either (a) multiplying the existing conversion value by a set variable (i.e. 1.2 or 0.3), or (b) by adding a fixed amount to the existing conversion value (i.e. +$20).
Let’s say you know that users in Washington, DC or Rockville, MD or Alexandria, VA who are also in your “Luxury Buyers” combined segment spend double the amount of typical customers at your store. You could set a value rule that multiplies the conversion value for users matching those conditions (geographic + audience) by 1.5, so you’re able to be more competitive in auctions for those buyers and capture incremental sales. Likewise, if you know that users on iPhones tend to spend more on your app than Android, you could set a value rule adding +$10 to your conversion value.
As with everything else in Google Ads, Value Rules also have priority orders. In the event that something satisfies multiple value conditions (i.e. you have one Value Rule for Manhattan, and another for New York State OR a user is in two different combined segments), Google will apply value rules in the following order:
- Location: Most granular will take precedence. This means that a zip code will be prioritized over a Congressional District, and a City over a State (for example).
- Audiences: Google prioritizes these in the following order: Customer Match > Remarketing > Affinity or In-Market > Demographics (including Detailed Demos).
- In the Event of a Tie: Google will choose the rule with the highest adjustment (gotta shake those cushions).
- All Other Cases: Google will still choose the rule with the highest adjustment (gotta shake those cushions VERY HARD).
The most common question (and misunderstanding) I hear from PPCers regarding value rules is this: aren’t they duplicative with bid adjustments? Why do I need them? The answer to this question is: no, they aren’t the same; and yes, you should use them because Value Rules tend to be better.
Let me explain (very quickly): in cases where bid modifiers work, they will change the value of either the bid or the CPA (depending on your campaign type). A value rule, on the other hand, will change the value of the conversion. The latter is more robust, as the Value-Adjusted conversion will be used by Google to predict the expected value of future conversions (along with 100,000+ other signals). While Bid Adjustments and Value Rules are similar, they are mathematically distinct. And, for my money, Value Rules are superior.
11. Creative + Ad Copy
- Variants – Variants are a sub-type of experiments (which you already know I adore) that allow you to test specific ad headlines and descriptions against one another. For RSAs, this is the optimal way to test specific changes to messaging, whether in one campaign or across your entire account.
The Variant will work exactly like an experiment: you’ll input the current headline/description (the “control”), along with a proposed change; Google will dynamically replace a percentage (set by you) of the control instances with the variant, and show you the performance differences.
There is no better method for testing specific copy within RSAs than Variants. They are wonderful. Use them, ideally as part of a larger structured RSA testing program (like the one I outlined here).
- Ad Customizers – Finally, there’s Ad Customizers. At their core, they do a simple thing: change the text of a search ad based on a condition. This can be simple (like inserting the number of awards won by a brand or the location of a store), or fantastically complex (like offering details and current prices of items, based on a specific search).
We all know that relevance matters in search advertising. Relevance leads to higher CTRs and higher CVRs, which, in turn, leads to higher Quality Scores + Ad Rank. Ad Customizers help you create more relevant ads at scale.
For most accounts I review, delivering tailored messaging requires complex setups, with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of ad groups, alongside a mind-numbing web of negatives and exclusions. Not only is that structure not machine-learning friendly, it is an absolute albatross to manage and report on. It just doesn’t work. Ad Customizers replace that structure – allowing you to tailor ads based on keyword, ad group, landing page or campaign using just about anything, from the make/model of a product, to the number in stock, to the location, to the exact number of reviews on your website. Your options are limited only by your imagination.
The best parts?
- The automatic updates happen each time the ad is triggered, so they don’t reset ad performance data. No more having to sum thousands of ad performance metrics to understand how your product campaign is performing.
- Every instance of where the customizer is used automatically updates if the linked value is changed. If you have a client that (for example) includes the number of 5* reviews in an ad, you’ll no longer have to find and replace each instance of that number when you get a new review. Ditto for awards or item prices or number of employees or whatever else you like. Simply update the customizer’s linked value, and every instance will be automatically modified to the new value. Easy peasy.
At the end of the day, Google Ads is an incredibly complex, powerful platform. Done well, it can have a transformative impact on your organization. Each of these 11 “Hidden Gems” can help you either (a) improve your account management or (b) be a better partner/senior leader by asking the right questions. I’m not saying that each of these should be used in every account; there are plenty of cases where using these doesn’t make sense. There are instances where doing so may hurt performance. But you’ll only learn that if you ask or try them out.
That’s all for this one!
Until next time,
-Sam
