OUR THINKING

Running paid ads campaigns is not set and forget. Like creating a garden, everything needs constant attention, refinement and love.
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9am — Budget pacing

First up (after coffee that is)… budget pacing. Doing this makes sure we achieve the target and performance goals within each campaign period.
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10am — Performance optimisation

Next, we dig into the ad accounts and check the daily reports to optimise campaign performance.

We look at the value of sales from the ad campaigns. With attribution set up at keyword level, we can see what drives the best sales and make optimal ad buying decisions.

We make changes to targeting, signals, creative and bidding to get more clicks; and optimise campaigns with search terms reviews, search trends, and creative tests.

We improve quality score wherever we can so that you pay less per bid.

After our second coffee, we attack some other things on our hit list:

• adding extensions for extra reasons to click
• updating landing page for more conversions
• scheduling ads to show when people are more likely to click
• and finding new keywords to target or exclude
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2pm — The Big Jobs

After lunch we’re pumped for major campaign changes such as briefing creative, ad copy updates, major structural changes, setting up a new campaign or ad group, or even a whole new channel.
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4pm — Chat to our favourite clients

(that’s all of them by the way!)

We’ll meet with clients in our regular WiPs or other members of the team to plan future media buying strategies to scale spend while maintaining ROAS.
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5pm — Grow our knowledge

We always make time for industry related news and updates so at the end of the day we check our news feeds so we we’re always one step ahead for our clients.

Contact us for help and advice from one of our paid ads specialists on running your paid ads.

If you’re a growing business and know your audience listens to music or podcasts, you can target them with your campaigns while they’re listening.

Simply couple a static image, simple animation or short video with words spoken in a conversational tone plus of course, your call to action.

Being Google, there’s also targeting options so that you can reach your audience exactly where they will be listening.

Advertisers are beginning to re-assign some of their budget to testing this new format.

We recommend using around 10% of any paid ads budget for test and learn.

Advertiser Pages

Last October, Google launched My Ad Centre. Within this tool is a section called “Advertiser Pages”.

These Advertiser Pages let you see all the other ads that your competitors have run over the past 30 days. Yes, really!

To view a competitor’s Advertiser Page, you’ll need to click on the three stacked dots next to an ad. From there, you can click to “See more ads by this advertiser”. Then you can filter these results by type: text, image, and video ads.

But remember, if you can do this to your competitors, they can do it to your ads too! So it’s important to make sure that you have an offer or product that they can’t copy!
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BuiltWith

The BuiltWith Chrome extension is a super sleuth tool that essentially lets you spy on your competitor’s website technology — giving you a clear view of what they prioritise.

Some competitor info that you can reveal includes:

• What platform they use
• Their SEO tricks like optimisation plugins and link-building tools
• The advertising and analytics tools they are using
• Their hosting service
• What conversion tags they’ve installed
  

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg 🤯 

ECommerce brands can gain insights into their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and potentially identify opportunities to improve their own website and customer experience. For example, if your competitor is using a faster hosting provider, you may need to upgrade your hosting to remain competitive.

Or if most of your competitors are using a particular tool or software, it may indicate that it’s becoming an industry standard.

Google’s new default ad type is the Responsive Search Ad (RSA) 🎉

This means…

Expanded Text Ads are no more. Instead of manually writing the entire text ad, advertisers provide a variety of different text assets (headlines, calls to action and descriptions) and then Google puts these together in different combinations. Et voila… an ad is born!

The tech speak for this is: an asset-driven, machine learning-powered ad format. Given enough of these assets, Google could serve a whopping 40,000 unique variations of any given ad!!!

So how do you come up with the right assets for the robots to combine? You contact us for our template which makes writing RSAs a breeze.
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What about other AI writing tools?

AI content creation means using tools powered by artificial intelligence to generate written content such as ads, website pages, and product descriptions (to name a few).

The content is pulled from a multitude of online sources, but there's a catch - it's not always clear where the information came from, or even if it's entirely accurate.

Does using AI generated content go against Google’s guidelines? Can Google even detect AI generated content? The short answer is no (at the moment), but if Google’s web spam team pick up on it, your website can be penalised. Why? Because content automatically generated with AI writing tools is considered spam, according to the search engine’s webmaster guidelines.

Google’s position on auto generated content is this: “For us it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.” — John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate

AI writing tools can be helpful, but they're not meant to replace humans. Search engines prefer human-written content that provides an enjoyable experience for readers and customers, while also striking a healthy balance with SEO best practices. You can use AI tools to research a topic, brainstorm ideas, or combat writers block. But make sure you keep that human touch.
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How will AI change the face of paid advertising to come?

Let’s take a closer look at other new technologies that are making waves in the world of AI.
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AI-powered voice assistants
‍Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are becoming more popular with people increasingly using voice search to find what they're looking for online — and this trend is only set to grow.
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Google's new AI assistant, Bard
‍Instead of the usual list of links, we will be able to talk to an AI bot and get direct responses to our queries. This means that we can refine our searches with a more human-like conversation, leading to better search results.
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Chatbot advertising
‍These AI-powered tools use natural language processing to understand what people want and give personalised responses to help them find what they need. Advertisers can leverage them to engage with consumers in real-time conversations.

While paid search is still important, advertisers need to adapt their strategies for this new era of search.

It's unclear whether this new way of searching will replace traditional search down the track, but one thing is for sure — it's an exciting development that's changing the way we interact with search engines.

PPC (Paid Ads) = instant results

Although your ads are put live instantly, they take time to mature. Some campaigns will generate sales quickly, while others can take time to see results. Just as with other forms of marketing, there are no guaranteed results when it comes to PPC either.
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PPC = Just Google and Facebook

Google has the majority market share in search engines, but this doesn’t mean it’s the only platform you should invest in.

Brands taking an omni-channel approach should also consider paid social - TikTok, Pinterest, even LinkedIn if it’s relevant.

The choices you make should depend on your budget and who you are trying to target.
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Use as many keywords as possible

More words = more reach right?

Wrong. While you may get more traffic, you run the risk of getting unqualified traffic.

Your keywords should be relevant and useful; otherwise, you’ll end up using budget on clicks that aren’t converting.
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You can set and forget with PPC

Nope! You can’t do that either!

As soon as campaigns go live you will start collecting data. That data tells you about performance. And that performance is something you can optimise over time.

We’re also big believers in using a portion of the budget for testing new ideas, formats and platforms too.
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PPC is too expensive

PPC spend isn’t the metric that matters the most here.

PPC ROI is what you should really be focusing on.

If your PPC campaigns are generating sales revenue that is greater than your ad spend, then PPC is actually paying for itself.
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You don’t need a PPC agency specialist

Unless you’re super knowledgeable in PPC (or aren’t but have plenty of time on your hands!), chances are you could benefit from working with someone who does this all day every day. Agencies like us focus solely on PPC, we keep up with the pace of change and clients benefit from the learnings we make across all campaigns.

Before we get going:

Paid search targets those searching for keywords related to your business through ads.

SEO ensures your website ranks well in organic search results.

Content is anything you write or create (videos, infographics, images etc) on your website.

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Why do you want to do this?‍

To dominate the SERPs 💪🏻

Search incrementality is a phrase used to describe the fact that when PPC ads stop, SEO also underperforms. The dual strategy of SEO and PPC working together is worth more than the sum of its parts. PLUS when consumers see the same website on top of the SERP and in the ad, they tend to consider it more credible.

Convinced? Ok so let’s talk tactics…

Retarget visitors who’ve read your content 👩🏻👩🏻👩🏻

So you’ve worked hard on your site’s content and SEO. People are visiting your site and engaging with say your blog or news articles. When they leave your website, you can track these users and show them ads for your brand or product. This is called retargeting and it increases your chances of converting site visitors to a paying customer.

Hot tip: With the demise of the cookie, this first-party data is becoming vital.

Enhance SEO content through PPC ad copy 🤩

Once you see which PPC ads bring the most conversions, you can get valuable information about what type of organic content, title tags, and meta descriptions to use for your website. By testing several types of ad copy, you can see what works for both the ad and then what could work on your website.

Here’s the bonus…

Once a page is optimised organically, and there’s consistency between copy on the page and the copy in the search ad, your ad quality score goes UP.

Why? Because both your ad relevance and landing page relevance go up and this means you pay less per click which ultimately means better ROAS!
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Increase the range of keywords to attract maximum visitors 📈

Look at the keyword reports from both SEO and PPC. Those ranking highly or getting lots of clicks will give you new ideas for what content to create. Likewise, you can use the SEO report to add keywords to your PPC campaign to fill any gaps and drive more clicks.