Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads, and in today's video, I am giving you a complete step-by-step breakdown on how to optimize search campaigns in Google Ads. Everything from campaign structure, to settings, to ad group structures, to keywords, to the negative keywords, to the ads ad assets, to the bidding strategies, all the way through to auction insights, knowing and seeing what your competitors are doing in your space, and how to make moves against it. All of that in this video. Make sure to watch the entire video. Lots of golden nuggets throughout it.
This is everything that we do here at Grow My Ads to move the needle on search campaigns. So I hope you get great value from this. I hope you make a lot of money putting some of these recommendations in practice to your account.
And I'm excited to share this with you. So let's dive in. All right.
So with optimization. We start with fundamentals, okay? So a lot of people, you know, they'll be like, how do I optimize my search campaigns? And they get into the weeds on all this stuff. And I'm like, hold on, you got to take a step back.
So what are you actually trying to do, right? Well, optimization at the end of the day, you are always trying to do the following, more good, less bad. That's it. It's super simple. All you're trying to do is analyze data, figure out what's working and providing money and making money.
at an ROI that we're trying to go after, or a goal that we're trying to go after? And what's not? And how do I fix the bad?
And how do I get more of the good? And if you can't fix the bad, how do I just get rid of the bad, right? That's optimization.
That's all you're doing. And then you're also looking at how to continue to forever grow if possible. So this is a forever game that you're playing.
And that's why, you know, you're not just auto-piloting these campaigns because eventually one day something will disrupt it and then you're back to square one. So the game of optimization never truly ends, unfortunately, but how to go about optimizing the search campaign, you need a framework to work from. And a lot of people don't seem to have that.
A lot of people are just diving in randomly to campaigns and clicking buttons and they have no idea what they're even doing. And so I hope in this video, You're going to at least have some clarity on how to actually start looking at your search campaigns holistically and then be able to start optimizing within a framework that I'm going to share with you here. So search campaigns are composed of the following campaign, right? Then the settings within those campaigns inside of your campaign, you're going to have ad groups inside of ad groups. You're going to have keywords and inside of those ad groups, you're also going to have ads, right?
It's super, super simple when you break it down like this. So to start actually optimizing what we do is work top down. So let's start with campaign structure.
The key to structure is to consolidate as much as possible when it makes sense. So years ago, I've been in this game too long, but I used to love skags, single keyword ad groups. I used to love alpha beta method. That's segmenting campaigns by a top performing exact match keywords.
And then you had a beta campaign that you were kind of using to mine keyword data. And then you would move exact matches up to the alpha campaign. Those were the glory days. In fact, my favorite time of optimizing Google ads campaigns, it's, it's, you would think AI and smart bidding and machine learning made this easier.
It didn't. It's just, it's actually, it's, it's so much harder today than what it was even just two, three, five years ago, because We've lost so much control and Google is a forever giant greedy organization that's just always trying to continue to make more money from their ads and a lot of what they've done unfortunately has pulled the that control from you and has made it really hard to steer the ship and and sort of make these big gains that we used to be able to make back with Skaggs and Alpha Beta method. Now there's still lots that can be done which is what we're going to talk about in this video on how to optimize these search campaigns but what no longer works is you know skags the alpha beta which my was my old favorite and i loved segmenting by match types or devices or any of that what works today is consolidating as much as possible getting as much data points within a campaign that makes sense and allowing the machine learning to really work from that now what does that look like so what when can it make sense to actually segment campaigns, right?
Brand versus non-brand, always. I've done a bazillion audits and I can't tell you how many today I still see. where brand terms are showing in their non-brand campaigns. You don't want that.
Brand is going to behave completely different. You want your ad messaging to be completely different to someone who's searching for your brand. So brand campaign, non-brand campaign, never mix these two. These should always be segmented.
Location. I've done audits where people just throw in like five different countries into a campaign and not my favorite strategy. Technically, the smart bidding machine learning should know how to adjust based off that i don't like it locations are especially international they're going to have different time zones and the audience is just going to be completely different so there's scenarios there all right we got to segment our campaigns by different locations most of the campaigns that we run for our clients you would see if they're running international campaigns those international campaigns are segmented away from what we're doing in the U.S.
In some cases, we do mix Canada and the U.S. depending on what the data shows, but a lot of times we're doing segmentation there. Categories. All right, if I'm Best Buy and I sell TVs, but I also sell video games, it probably doesn't make sense to mix TV keywords and ad groups in with video game keyword and ad groups. More than likely CPCs are going to be different.
The cost of these products are going to be different. You know, a TV could be in the thousands. A video game is like 70 bucks, 50 bucks, whatever it is today.
So totally different products there. We're going to want those categories segmented out. Does it make sense to mix those?
And then different goals. In some scenarios, you're going to have products that might have higher margin. All right, well.
We're going to operate these with different goals in mind. So we would have a campaign structure splitting that out. So consolidation is key today. However, you still need to do that in a way that makes sense strategically.
So you still need to segment, but when it makes sense. So what I'm to give an example of what would it make sense is if you had TV campaign, but you did that, you segmented that. by multiple TV campaigns.
So maybe you're like, well, we have a 50 inch TV campaign, 65 inch TV campaign, 75. That would not make sense. Those you would want to consolidate into one campaign. So just know, don't, I'm not telling you to go consolidate your entire account into one campaign.
Absolutely not. What I am saying though, is look through your structure and find examples of where it might make sense to consolidate. some of your efforts in 2.1 campaign. So here's an example of what I mean where you could consolidate. Now I happen to know this account very well so the reason This deep seat sectional campaign is segmented.
There is a reason behind it. However, if there wasn't that unique reason behind it, this is a scenario that you could lump deep seat sectional into your main sectionals campaign. The price point is very similar.
It's very similar terms and the goal is the same. So it doesn't really make sense to have it segmented out on its own. It actually... more than likely would perform better lumped into the main sectionals campaign now if this were an ottomans campaign that's different ottomans have different price points different keywords etc so that's fine to have segmented but for this main sectionals campaign this is a sectional it's just a type of sectional so it's got a different theme to it which I'll talk about when we get into the ad group section. But here, ideally, you would actually just run deep seat sectionals as ad groups inside of your main sectionals campaign, which gives more data consolidated into one campaign.
Now, again, I know what's going on in this case. So there's a reason behind it. But in most cases, it would be good to consolidate. Okay, campaign settings.
So this is honestly the first place to check when optimizing campaigns is important. Check the settings first. Is there any major issue within the settings? That could actually just be killing the campaign completely.
So always check the settings. I have a full list here of settings to check, but I'm going to hop into a real campaign and go one by one through them. Okay.
I'm in an actual campaign. I'm in the settings and I'm just going to check. All right.
What are the main settings? Are they correct? So number one goals I've seen in many cases where The goal is completely different than what they actually want to go after so they accidentally put in other conversion goals that were tracking that they had no idea.
That results in double tracking or incorrect tracking. So then you can't, nothing else matters if you have the incorrect conversion set to your campaign. Bidding, keywords, none of it even matters anymore because you're operating that campaign off of inaccurate. conversion data. So in this case, this is an e-commerce business.
We're just going after purchases and that's all we want is purchases. So this looks clean to me. I do see a lot of cases, people accidentally go to use campaign specific and they'll create specific campaign goals. And that's where they forget that they did that. And then they'll build new campaigns with different conversion goals and then it gets really messy.
So always make sure, you know, am I going after the correct conversions for e-commerce? Usually that's purchases and phone calls for lead generation. Usually that's form fills and phone calls. Not saying that's the only conversions that ever exist. Obviously there's more, but usually those are the main macros.
Customer acquisition. I don't normally, I don't have this in my sheet because I didn't really want to confuse anyone here, though. You can click optimize campaign for acquiring new customers.
All this does, though, is sort of inflates. So if you assign a value to this, this would inflate the actual conversion value here. This is not something I normally use on our search campaigns and then only bid for new customers.
Again, this isn't usually something I'm running for the most part in my search campaigns. People may ask, well, why not? because if someone is typing in a non-brand term, so this is for sectionals, if they're typing in sectional sofa and let's say they were an existing customer or let's say they visit our website before, well, they're on Google searching for my product, but they're not coming and buying from me right now.
In that moment, they're searching for sectional sofas again. I wanna get back in front of their face. So yeah, I don't care.
I just, I wanna, I want. to sell them a sectional. Why are they searching for a sectional? So I don't, there's a, there is a strategy for this customer acquisition goal.
And most of my search campaigns, I'm not running it. So you can just ignore that setting for now. And most people who run this customer acquisition setting usually run it incorrectly.
They start bidding higher. They edit the value to be extremely high and then forget. And then it's like, well, Hey, no wonder your back in revenue numbers don't match your Google ads numbers. You gave. new customer acquisition revenue, you know, a thousand dollars more in value.
So I don't want to go too in the weeds on it. Just skip it. You can just skip that part for now and not worry about it.
But I can tell you in almost 90% plus of our search campaigns, you will not see us utilizing this setting. Marketing objective. This is just when you're building the campaign. This, this means nothing. So don't even worry about that.
And then I have, in our creating a search campaign video. which will be in the description below. I go through a lot of this too. Networks.
This is one you should always make sure display is not on search. You never want display on search. It behaves totally differently.
And then search partners. You want to check the performance of search partners. Where would you actually check search partner performance?
So I'm at the campaign level inside of the account and you go to segment and then you just hit network with search partners. So here's an account that's actually running display network. and search partners.
Look at this. So here's a search campaign. It has had one conversion for $850 CPA, Google search 33.52 conversions at a $154 CPA. Okay.
I would probably go ahead and chalk this up as search partners does not work very well. So I would turn search partners off. Now search partners can work.
So it either works and it's great, or it doesn't work and get rid of it. That's it. You don't have to go any more complex than that. It either works and you're happy with the results, or it doesn't and you turn it off.
And then in this campaign, they have display network on again. I never recommend this. I hate that Google did that. I think it was a money grab by them. All right, location settings.
This is where you would be targeting. Only thing here I always make sure people have set is this target setting. So if you hit location options, Do not run presence or interest. This will fire.
I have seen, you know, traffic from other countries populate, even though you're only targeting the United States. So to help control that, just have your target settings set to presence. So these are people in that location. Someone could show interest in Google's eyes, but live in, you know, Ireland.
You may not serve or ship to Ireland though. And so you don't want to rely on what Google thinks someone's interest is. You want to control that a bit.
So this will help make sure you don't get too much out of area traffic. And so I always, always have this presence target setting set up. All right. Then you have budget. So budget could be its own entire video, which I don't have one on yet, but what you want to make sure.
If you are looking at an account and there is a campaign that is limited by budget but is performing the highest, then why not allocate more to that campaign? I see it time and time again. So it's like, hey, you spent only 50% of your budget to this campaign, which is limited by budget, and it generated more than 80% of your conversions. Why not?
take some money away from the other campaigns that are lower performing, reallocate that budget to the high-performing campaign, and continue to maximize your results from the high-performing campaign or campaigns. In some cases, they might have reasons why. In many cases, they're like, oh, we never thought of that.
It's just proper budget allocation. I will have a future video potentially on proper budget allocation. But for now, all you have to think is, is this campaign performing well? Is it limited by budget?
Why am I not giving it more budget if it's performing well, hitting my goal and I'm limited? That's all you need to think about is, can I give this more fuel? Why am I not giving it more fuel?
All right, we've got bidding then. I have bidding for, I have bidding last. I'll tell you why, but we've got to get through the other sections first.
But I do have a whole thing on bidding. All right, another thing to check, ad schedule. Now in this campaign, we're running 24-7. However, there are times I've audited accounts and their hours of operation are from 9 to 5 Eastern time.
And their hours of their campaigns are not 9 to 5 and they're going for phone calls. So I'm like, well, do you have, you know, customer service reps or a call center that's 24-7? No, we don't. then why would you run ads for a call conversion when no one's there to pick the phone up? So they, obviously they fix that, but ad schedule always make sure it makes sense for e-commerce.
Usually 24 hours is fine. Every once in a while you'll find, you know, Hey, super late at night doesn't do well or something. I normally at this point, let smart bidding just work that there are rare cases though, that I will go in. if I just see complete outliers in the data, I will actually set an ad schedule then for an e-commerce business.
For the most part, smart bidding is really good though, working with all of those hours. So I just let it open up 24 seven. I want to make money 24 seven.
So I want to run ads 24 seven. If you are a local service-based business though, the ad schedule can be more important to you. Ideally you can run 24 seven, but if you, if you don't have form fills, so if no one can actually fill a form out and you're only going after phone calls.
then you have to make sure if someone calls, you can actually pick that call up because then there's like a 90% chance you're not going to get the business if you don't actually pick the call up. The other thing, let's say you run form fills and do calls. If you go into your ad assets and you go to your call extension.
Now in this account, we don't run a call extension, but if you were running phone calls and that was important to you. So the mobile call extension, what a lot of people forget about is if you go to advanced options. You can choose when this shows.
So I've done a lot of audits for local service-based businesses. They're like, well, we run ads 24 seven because we get form fills. But I'm like, yeah, but you're also running your phone number call extension 24 seven.
That doesn't make any sense, does it? So run this to what your hours of operation are where you could actually pick the phone call up and no one seems to realize that this is even a setting. So.
Here you go. Here's a little golden nugget. So if you're only open 9 to 5 p.m. and you can only answer calls 9 to 5 p.m., you don't want this call, click to call ad extension showing any other time from 9 to 5. So always, always check that and your ad schedule. Okay, devices, always just check device performance.
If you're running smart bidding, Then most computing will take care of the device bit adjustment. So you don't actually have to come in here and bit adjust. You'll notice in this account, I have tablets 100% excluded. Historically, tablets just did absolutely nothing.
Again, And some people like, well, smart bidding, we'll figure that out and take care of it. It will still trickle in clicks each month, even if it's just one or two. I don't want to give Google any more money than they deserve. So if I know tablets don't do well for us, I just don't even run it. So in this case, I just have tablets excluded.
I'm not saying tablets don't do well for other accounts or industries. In this case, we ran all the data. I just did not make sense to run tablet traffic.
So in this case, we're just running on mobile and desktop. Always make sure to check devices. If there's any crazy outlier there, you can exclude. And if you're running manual CPC bidding or even target CPA, a bid adjustment will actually do something for you.
We'll get to the bidding section later. And I have an entire masterclass video on bidding that talks about everything you need to know with bids and bid adjustments. But always, always make sure when you're optimizing the search campaign, take a look at the device settings.
All right, audience section. Now, when I'm doing optimizations of search campaigns or doing the audits, what I'm normally looking at in the audience section is usually for accounts that have a demographic they probably don't want to serve. And if we potentially can look at the data of that demographic within the audience section and... make adjustments from there.
Let me give you an example. I did an audit of an account. They sell ultra high end backyard renovations, like super amazing movie scene looking backyard patios, right? This was in Miami. So these were like high, high, high end expensive renovations.
I had a feeling that 18 to 24 year old was probably not their demographic. So you can look at demographics. Most cases, I am not excluding, I'm letting just kind of the smart bidding figure that out.
But here you can kind of see where data is coming from, from the age demographics. And if a certain demographic doesn't make sense or the data proves that they are unprofitable, I just go ahead and exclude it. Same with household income.
So Obviously lower than 50% for someone who is selling $100,000 plus backyard renovations to luxury homeowners, probably lower 50% isn't going to be their demographic. So in that case, we would just simply exclude lower than 50%. You don't want to go too crazy because Google's not perfect.
They could have someone who's a millionaire accidentally in the 41 to 50%. household income. So you don't want to go crazy with this, but the absolute outliers you do want to look at potentially excluding. All right. The other thing to consider though, with excluding demographics is you can only do it in certain industries.
So if you're in like finances or housing of any sort, like real estate or mortgages and anything like that, Google will not let you exclude anyone. So you might not have the ability to do it, but if you are in a industry where you know, like, yeah, 18 to 24 year olds is not our demographic, then just go ahead and exclude that. Again, don't go crazy. Don't try to narrow in on just one demographic.
That's not what I'm telling you to do. Just look for those extreme outliers. Okay.
ad group structure. So like campaigns, your goal of ad groups is to consolidate as much as you can and segment only when it makes sense. So the goal of your ad group is to group keywords and ads that match together and will resonate with the searcher.
Hence the name ad group. I think a lot of people forget that, right? It's called an ad group.
So it's a group of keywords with an ad. A lot of people have gone too crazy with it. The simplest structure is usually an ad group per unique landing page.
you want to target or using the stag method. I did not create that name, which is single themed ad group. Here is an example. Okay. So we have plumber or plumbing campaign.
The stag method would be themes now. So we have plumbing general, that's plumbing companies, plumbing services, plumbing near me. Then we have plumbing emergency. So here we have only emergency plumbing keywords. Then we have plumbing, affordable, affordable plumber, cheap plumber.
If you were doing the single keyword ad group structure, SCAG structure back in the day, each one of these would be their own ad groups. So instead of just three ad groups, you probably would end up with, you know, seven to 10 ad groups in this scenario. Here, we lump them into themes. All right, we have emergency, we have affordable, and then we have general.
So this is how you should be thinking about it. Also, Ads now for plumbing affordable. People are going to be more centered around affordability ads for emergency, obviously going to be a 24 seven service emergency plumber, and then ads for general are going to be probably trying to mix in most of your features and benefits, but not laser in on just one like affordability or emergency.
So this is how you should be looking at your ad group structure. It should be themed and it should be as consolidated as possible. Now, Don't go too crazy with that. So when to segment or create new ad groups, you can create a better ad or landing page for a set of keywords. You have an ad group or set of keywords that need more attention and need to move to their own campaign.
Maybe they're not getting enough impressions or clicks or ad group or keyword performance is significantly different and you need to isolate those poor performers. Let me jump into a real ad group and show you what not to do. Okay, I am inside of an ad group. And this is exactly what you do not want to do.
So this is a company that sells all kinds of parts, but they also sell John Deere parts. And they might've listened to a Google rep, I don't know, but they just threw in an insane amount, 137 broad match keywords in here. This is like the ultimate way of basically just like giving Google your credit card and letting it run.
bill. They've got John Deere tractors. They have John Deere riding mowers, mower blades, hydraulic oil, oil, tires, decals, weights, toys, all mixed into one ad group.
And I can't really show you the ad. It would give too much information away as to who they are. But the ad's super generic.
It's just like, yeah, we have John Deere parts. Okay. This is not what you want to do. So This is too much consolidation.
Again, the goal is you want to consolidate as much as possible, but segment when you can create better ad copy to the set of keywords. So it does not make sense to be running John Deere riding mowers with John Deere toys. Toys should be a separate ad group or probably even a separate campaign in this case, where now you're only going after John Deere toy keywords in your ads.
our John Deere toy related copy. And guess what? If you click that ad, where do you go? You probably go to the John Deere toy product category. Now, John Deere riding mowers.
Now you segment those into an ad group. You have most of your mower terms and your ad is going to be mower related copy. And you're going to send them to a John Deere riding mower landing page or category page, right? This is not what you want to do.
This is an absolute waste. Google wants you probably to think this is the world we live in today. Hey, just throw in hundreds of broad match keywords, flick on smart bidding, and we'll do the rest for you.
This is an absolute disaster. This makes no money. This is losing significant amount of return for them.
And this is an example of what not to do. Now in my ad group structure that I just explained going by themes, what would I be doing? Well, I would be looking at these terms. And I would be going into then the search terms and I would start looking at what we're currently selling and then what we're getting some volume on, right?
So I would probably start picking this apart. Definitely I would have a mower parts ad group and then all my mower part terms would be in there. Here's gator parts.
So this would be a separate ad group in itself. This potentially could be its own campaign just depending on what their budget is and how big they are. But gator, John Deere gators separate from a John Deere mower.
Gator is like a utility vehicle. So this, this is its own category. Tractor parts would be different from mower parts could still live in the same campaign. So just, you know, like a John Deere sort of parts campaign, but we would have a separate ad group from mower and tractor because I, again, ads would be ad copy would be different and related to tractors.
And then the landing page you go to would also be different. So Here's kind of a breakdown of what not to do. And here's sort of how I would start looking at segmenting and combining my search term keyword sets that would make sense into ad groups.
All right, keywords. So keyword optimization comes down to the following. Pausing poor performing keywords, adding new keywords from the search query report, adding new negative keywords.
By the way, I have a full YouTube video on negative keywords. I will have that in the description below. So if you want to know how to add negative keywords, well, I have a full video on that.
Also, I have a video on keyword match types and keywords itself. I will have that in the description below as well. So if you want to go more in depth and that's in this notion doc here, so keyword match types, and I'll add the negative keyword video in here as well.
So few questions though, from that, right? When to pause poor performing keywords. So no hard rule here, but you'll know a loser when you see a loser.
So if a keyword has had hundreds of clicks showing significantly lower conversion rate and is significantly below your goal. then you're probably better off just pausing that out. You're going to, you're going to know a loser when you see it. Okay.
So when to add new keywords? Well, if a search term has at least 30 impressions, I'm saying about one impression per day, usually to me is like, all right, that's one a day that might have enough volume for me to want to test. Um, and it has shown signs of good performance.
Then I like to add and test these keywords. And then what match type do you add those keywords in? So this is going to depend.
on your current structure. So if you're using all broad match keywords successfully, then I add new keywords in all broad match, but I also like adding top performing keywords in exact match form. This way I can see my impression share metric because you don't, if you add it just in broad, and then you look at the search query report of like a top, top term, it won't give you the search impression metrics. So I like getting individual metrics on my top. top performing exact match keywords.
So I do, even if I am running a full broad match campaign structure, I will add the exact match in there as well. So I can get those metrics. Now, if exact match doesn't perform well, then I'll just pause it out over time.
But I do like to test the exact match version of that while still running broad match. Let me give you an example. All right. So I'm inside of an actual ad group.
This is for a company that does like match. company formation services in the UK. I can't give you more information than that, but you'll notice I'm running broad and exact match and I'm getting then the exact data.
What's my search impression share. Now this, some of this will be blurred out, but the reason I'm not just relying on fully on broad match is because I like to know on these top. terms with the highest volume, what is my search impression share for someone that's sort of exactly typing in company formation or UK company formation? Now we know it's not exact because the close variant, but I like getting that data and my performance on these terms are pretty good.
Now I'm getting the volume from broad, right? Register a company broad's bringing in an insane amount of volume for me, but I don't just, if I just paused everything and just left this keyword go. I would lose volume for sure. And so what I do in this case, all of these keywords resonate with the ad copy that we're running. And in here, I've tested the broad and exact match of every single one of these keywords.
Over time, I'll find some don't do well, and I'll pause them and then just let the broad match version run. Or if the broad match version doesn't do well, I'll just let the exact match run. But In here, I do have a mixture and I just wanted to give you a real life example of that because there's a lot of people who claim broad 100%.
Although that I do see successful cases of that, I am still an advocate of adding in some exact match just to get some of that data insight to those exact match high volume terms that I want to be on. Okay, if you are not running full broad match, then it is fine to just add phrase or exact or both. of the new terms that you're seeing in the search query report of adding new keywords.
So most of our clients or most of our accounts, the whole broad thing is big spenders, smaller spenders. I'm still utilizing for the most part, a lot of the phrase and exact where we can, we'll test broad if the campaign's dialed in, but if broad doesn't work, it just doesn't work. So we have to go back. We're using phrase and exact. So in those cases, if I'm finding search terms in the search query report that I want to add new keywords and test, I'm adding those then as phrase and exact in those accounts.
Okay, so what to do with keywords you add? Well, pretty simple. You either add them to the existing ad group or you create a new ad group for these keywords if you can create more relevant ad copy. So in the case of the UK business registration, if I found a term in the search query report that I wanted to add as a keyword, but it was not just how to...
form a company or I want to form a company in the UK, but it was, I want to buy a business name. So how to buy a business name or buy business name UK, that term would not make sense to put in the ad group where I'm just. advertising on generic company formation terms and ad copy. I would create a new ad group for business name registration or buying a business name in the UK. And then now my ad copy would be all about buying a business name in the UK, and I would send them to that landing page as well.
So you just have to, when you go to add, you're like, does this make sense in the existing ad group? Or does this make sense to actually build out a new ad group? Because I can create more relevant ad copy and more relevant landing page I could send them to. Also, don't add keywords to just add keywords. This really drives me insane when I do audits and I see people dump a thousand keywords in the ad group.
It's just so stupid. It just creates an absolute mess. It's unnecessary in the day of the age of machine learning. So don't just go in there and add every keyword possible.
That kind of worked five, six, seven years ago. Add every keyword, no demand, put a lot of small bids on them and just kind of get some traffic trickling in little by little on those keywords. You don't need to do that anymore. It makes no sense. It's absolute clutter.
doesn't need to happen. So don't just go in and add keywords, add keywords. Again, follow the framework of looking at impressions, looking at, am I getting some good performance from it? And so that's why I want to get additional traffic from it and additional insight into how those keywords are behaving.
So don't just go in there and go trigger happy on adding keywords. Okay. Ads and ad assets for the sake of time, because I know this video is already pretty long. I have already done a lot.
of video content on ads. So I've included those videos in the description below. If you're looking at this notion doc, then they will be in the notion doc too. Just know when it comes to ads, just remember test impactful, meaningful tests, run ad tests and controlled experiments, utilize all ad assets that make sense.
And always, always review for ad and ad asset disapprovals often. So go check out if you want information on like testing and optimizing ads and ad assets. I've got a whole video on testing and optimizing responsive search ads.
I have an entire video on how to create responsive search ads. We also, in our library of video content on YouTube, how to create irresistible ad copy, how to create ads using ChatGPT. So we have a ton of ad copy videos.
Go ahead, go check all that out. That will help you in the optimization stage of your ads. All right, bidding. I told you I'd save this one for the end. Here's why.
A lot of people think bidding is what makes or breaks their campaign success. And I absolutely disagree with that. So it's very important.
But the reason I include this towards the end, because this is technically a campaign setting. And as you remember, we started with campaign settings at the beginning. The reason I put this at the end is bidding. will not save an account with poor campaign structure, incorrect campaign settings, and bad keywords and ad groups.
So remember that ad group with hundreds of John Deere terms, John Deere toys, John Deere mowers, John Deere tractors, bidding will not save that. That is an absolute disaster of an ad group that's been created. It doesn't matter what bid strategy you test or how crazy you go in with bid strategies, it will not save. that campaign because that campaign is built for failure.
And that is why I put bidding towards the end. Bidding is there to just steer the math of the campaign to your goal, whether that's a ROAS goal, a cost per acquisition goal, a profit goal, doesn't matter. Bidding just takes the foundation you've built from campaign settings to ad group structure, to the keywords that you're bidding on, to the ads that you're actually writing and showing for those keywords.
Bidding takes all of that and it steers the math to be able to make it profitable dependent on what your goal is. So I could talk all day about bidding and I already have. So I have an entire bidding master class totally free on our YouTube channel. Again, in the Notion doc, I've included it. It's pretty large.
It contains, by the way, its own Notion doc. So everything you would need to know about Google ads bidding strategies is here. I would recommend going and watching that again. This will also be in the description below of this YouTube video. But if you take one thing away from this video, bidding just steers the campaign, steers the math, right?
Don't rely on bidding to save you everything else we've talked about in this video. That's really what will. make or break the success of your campaign.
Not saying I've ran into times where bidding can take a really decent structure and it wasn't working and we just dialed in the bidding and got it profitable. I'm not saying that doesn't exist. It does. However, a lot of people I talk to, they just think bidding's what makes or breaks their campaign.
That's absolutely untrue. It's everything else that goes into the campaigns that will make the success of your account. Okay, auction insight report.
This gives you data on competitors who are competing with you in the same ad auction. So this is an optimization as well that a lot of people just like forget to talk about. You should be reviewing your auction insight report frequently.
We have some accounts. We're looking at this like every week because we have to, because we're like neck to neck in competition with some of our competitors. And guess what?
I have an entire YouTube video on auction insight reports, how to read the reports, why it's important. All you need to know from the search campaign optimization side of things is you should be reviewing your competition on the keywords that you're bidding on. What are they doing compared to what you're doing?
Do you see any rapid movements in search impression share or overlap rate with any of those competitors? If you do, you should be on top of that because you're going to feel that in your account. In that YouTube video on the Auction Insight Report, again, that will be in the description below.
and in the Notion doc, I give you a real case study of a client that we have, or we come like neck to neck with a competitor and it absolutely, what they do impacts the results of the campaign. I show you the real case study of that. Obviously I don't give you their information, but you see when they ramp up, our conversions drop. When they drop down, our conversions go up.
It's like the perfect case study for looking at. competitor analysis using the auction insight report. That video again in the description below, go check that out if you want to know how to fully look at auction insight report.
Okay, then to wrap this thing up, Google recommendations, yes or no? No, for the most part. So I recommend reviewing any recommendations, but do not auto apply any of these recommendations without first reviewing.
I also recommend turning off all auto apply recommendations. Lo and behold, I have more YouTube videos for you guys. So I have videos on auto-apply recommendations.
I also have videos on Google Ads Optimization Score, which is a metric based off of the Google recommendations that they give you in the account. Go check both of these videos out again in the description below if you want to know more about that. But I yield to reviewing manually, never auto-applying, and I turn off most of the auto-apply recommendations. There you go.
You are now an expert on... Search campaign optimization. I know that was a long video.
So if you made it all the way through, congratulations. Hopefully you are now a certified master of search campaigns. If you have any questions, put them in the comments below. I will do my best to answer if I can or if I see it.
And I hope you got great value from this. I'll see you on the next video.