The Quick and Dirty Truth About Every Campaign Type Inside of Google Ads

Kasim: 00:00:11

Let's burst some bubbles.

Kasim: 00:00:12

I'm gonna give you the quick and dirty truth about every campaign

Kasim: 00:00:15

type inside of Google Ads.

Kasim: 00:00:16

This is all the stuff that nobody wants to talk about, but everybody

Kasim: 00:00:19

who runs Google knows is true.

Kasim: 00:00:20

Foist, foremost, search.

Kasim: 00:00:24

So expensive, but so effective.

Kasim: 00:00:26

Here's the thing about search.

Kasim: 00:00:27

You're at the extreme bottom of the funnel.

Kasim: 00:00:29

I want to buy your widget right now.

Kasim: 00:00:31

Today everybody wants to bid on that traffic.

Kasim: 00:00:34

This is people raising their hand.

Kasim: 00:00:34

By the way, everybody wants to bid on that traffic.

Kasim: 00:00:37

The best analogy I have is you're suiting up throwing on some armor, grabbing

Kasim: 00:00:40

some weapons, and you're going into the call to see 'em, and you're going

Kasim: 00:00:43

head to head with all your competitors.

Kasim: 00:00:44

Wham, pow, smack, pow if you can't compete, you can't compete.

Kasim: 00:00:48

And by the way, having the best product doesn't mean that you can compete.

Kasim: 00:00:51

My favorite example is Salesforce.

Kasim: 00:00:53

Salesforce is banking on a 25 year ltv, 25 year retention.

Kasim: 00:01:00

That means that.

Kasim: 00:01:00

Even if they have an inferior product, they're gonna be able to give more,

Kasim: 00:01:05

offer more, do more, spend more than any newbie in the space, right?

Kasim: 00:01:09

You have to be VC backed before you can compete with that.

Kasim: 00:01:11

The example I use often too is life insurance If you're selling nothing

Kasim: 00:01:14

but life insurance, you're making like, I forget what those guys make.

Kasim: 00:01:16

God bless 'em.

Kasim: 00:01:17

It's like a hundred dollars on the policy for the life of the policy.

Kasim: 00:01:19

Insurance companies are willing to spend.

Kasim: 00:01:21

More than they make on a life insurance policy because they know they'll get

Kasim: 00:01:24

you for a bunch of other policies.

Kasim: 00:01:25

So if you just sell life insurance, you can't compete inside of search.

Kasim: 00:01:29

This is where all the competition goes.

Kasim: 00:01:31

And so you have to do a viability study.

Kasim: 00:01:33

Make sure that you can be viable inside of search now, because

Kasim: 00:01:35

it's to the bottom of the funnel.

Kasim: 00:01:36

The way to answer this is to lift yourself outta the bottom and

Kasim: 00:01:38

move towards the middle of the top by providing valuable content.

Kasim: 00:01:40

But you, what you're doing is you're trading time for money.

Kasim: 00:01:42

That's time for money.

Kasim: 00:01:43

So the bottom of the funnel spend lots of money, takes very little time.

Kasim: 00:01:47

As you move up the funnel, you spend way less money, but it takes way more time.

Kasim: 00:01:50

Dynamic search ads, dsa, now this is still search but the thing that I like

Kasim: 00:01:55

about DSA is Google is determining your placements for you based off of

Kasim: 00:01:59

the content on your page, and you end up with little pockets of traffic that

Kasim: 00:02:03

A, you wouldn't have gotten before.

Kasim: 00:02:04

And B, are.

Kasim: 00:02:06

Generally uncontested.

Kasim: 00:02:07

where search is really expensive, in most instances DSA ends up being

Kasim: 00:02:12

less so because you're letting Google sell you traffic that

Kasim: 00:02:15

Google thinks is viable but isn't necessarily quite as contentious now.

Kasim: 00:02:18

Does it always work?

Kasim: 00:02:19

No.

Kasim: 00:02:20

The thing that really helps with DSA is if you have a content rich

Kasim: 00:02:22

website go build out the content on your website before you run dsa.

Kasim: 00:02:25

This is true for e-comm and lead generation.

Kasim: 00:02:27

Make sure that you've offered as much information as you possibly can

Kasim: 00:02:30

that Google can draw upon and use.

Kasim: 00:02:31

Because if you give Google that, then it's gonna use it.

Kasim: 00:02:34

If you don't have that, then DSA is gonna die on the vine display.

Kasim: 00:02:37

I've never made outbound display work ever.

Kasim: 00:02:40

I've seen it work.

Kasim: 00:02:41

I've actually been given campaigns by clients who've made it work

Kasim: 00:02:44

elsewhere, and then we took it over.

Kasim: 00:02:46

know, a lot of that might just be the type of client that we attract too.

Kasim: 00:02:49

Like we're not doing Fortune 100 companies, we're doing smaller businesses,

Kasim: 00:02:52

and display is this massive ecosystem.

Kasim: 00:02:55

The Google Display network reaches 90% of all internet users on the planet, and

Kasim: 00:03:00

Google doesn't allow for the type of segmentation that would make display.

Kasim: 00:03:03

As functional as Facebook out of the gate.

Kasim: 00:03:05

It has that segmentation, but it doesn't allow for that for a bunch of reasons

Kasim: 00:03:09

that actually make a lot of sense.

Kasim: 00:03:11

The short version is they don't wanna get sued and they don't

Kasim: 00:03:12

want a congressional hearing.

Kasim: 00:03:14

Outbound display is a really tough nut to crack.

Kasim: 00:03:17

You need to have conversion tracking that is absolutely rock solid, including the

Kasim: 00:03:21

ability to tell Google what's happening after the click if you're doing lead gen.

Kasim: 00:03:24

So how much a prospect is worth, preferably from an LTV perspective you

Kasim: 00:03:27

need to spend an immense amount of money.

Kasim: 00:03:28

We're talking a hundred thousand dollars a month is the beginning, and you need

Kasim: 00:03:32

to just let it run and optimize itself.

Kasim: 00:03:34

, the client that we saw really make display work.

Kasim: 00:03:37

They were in the financial services industry and they spent like, 80 grand

Kasim: 00:03:41

a month for nine months or something.

Kasim: 00:03:44

Now they hemorrhaged that money, but at the end, their cost per lead was insanity.

Kasim: 00:03:52

It was like so dialed in.

Kasim: 00:03:54

it was truly unbelievable.

Kasim: 00:03:55

I was just blown away by it.

Kasim: 00:03:56

So display can work, but you need a great big, spend.

Kasim: 00:03:59

A lot of patience and a thick spine video.

Kasim: 00:04:03

Be very careful with video.

Kasim: 00:04:05

Video doesn't mean YouTube.

Kasim: 00:04:06

Video means whatever video, whatever Google decides video means.

Kasim: 00:04:10

Google's video placements are very liberal and I don't love Google's

Kasim: 00:04:14

video partners, to be honest with you.

Kasim: 00:04:15

I don't like the way that video can manifest with

Kasim: 00:04:18

Google's expanded placements.

Kasim: 00:04:19

So when I run video ads, I purely stick to YouTube.

Kasim: 00:04:22

Now, it's been some time since we've tested this, so if you've cracked

Kasim: 00:04:24

the code on, other Google's more liberal placements, let me know.

Kasim: 00:04:27

I know in some instances you actually can't restrict, which sucks.

Kasim: 00:04:29

I learned that live on a podcast with Al Keck.

Kasim: 00:04:31

It was really embarrassing.

Kasim: 00:04:33

I was like, you know, Al Rick, we, generally don't do this and then Alex

Kasim: 00:04:35

goes, actually, you can't anymore.

Kasim: 00:04:36

They took that option away from me last year and I was like, wow.

Kasim: 00:04:39

Shows what I know.

Kasim: 00:04:39

Would be really interested in somebody who's running video campaigns

Kasim: 00:04:42

outside of YouTube and is successful.

Kasim: 00:04:44

So if that's you, hit me in the comments.

Kasim: 00:04:45

But otherwise I stick entirely to YouTube.

Kasim: 00:04:46

Cause that's where I see the quality video traffic shopping.

Kasim: 00:04:49

Standard shopping is making a comeback.

Kasim: 00:04:51

With a vengeance.

Kasim: 00:04:52

Pmax was, the Blue Ocean.

Kasim: 00:04:54

We were the Performance Max agency.

Kasim: 00:04:56

It was crushing life, kicking ass, kicking names, and then everybody went to it.

Kasim: 00:05:00

And interestingly, now we've shifted back to standard

Kasim: 00:05:02

shopping and It's amazing, man.

Kasim: 00:05:04

When the pendulum swings, it's amazing how successful you can be if

Kasim: 00:05:07

you just swing in the opposite way.

Kasim: 00:05:09

The pendulum swings to the right.

Kasim: 00:05:11

I swing to the left, pendulum swings to the left.

Kasim: 00:05:13

I swing back to the right.

Kasim: 00:05:14

And the other thing that's really interesting is now that we're some of

Kasim: 00:05:17

the bigger educators in the space, it makes you wonder how much of that pen,

Kasim: 00:05:19

pendulum swing we're responsible for.

Kasim: 00:05:21

You know, we brought people to Performance Max, which ruined performance Max.

Kasim: 00:05:23

So we're going back to standard shopping now.

Kasim: 00:05:25

People are gonna go back to standard shopping and then

Kasim: 00:05:26

we're, you know what I mean?

Kasim: 00:05:27

Like, it's just an interesting philosophical problem.

Kasim: 00:05:29

it's self-imposed.

Kasim: 00:05:31

That said, standard shopping is, this is where the actual shopping feed.

Kasim: 00:05:35

In order to be successful with standard shopping, you have to have.

Kasim: 00:05:38

Phenomenally well optimized feeds.

Kasim: 00:05:39

You also don't wanna sleep on G T I N codes, G T I N codes.

Kasim: 00:05:43

It's the unique identifier for every product, and it's what Google

Kasim: 00:05:45

uses in order to optimize against.

Kasim: 00:05:47

So you can change things like titles, descriptions, images, and

Kasim: 00:05:49

Google still knows that you're talking about the same product.

Kasim: 00:05:51

So Google shopping's great for e-comm but you're gonna need a lot of

Kasim: 00:05:54

media, especially lifestyle images.

Kasim: 00:05:56

if I'm buying a dress, I dunno why I'd be buying a dress.

Kasim: 00:05:58

I just came out.

Kasim: 00:05:59

Might need to examine myself a little bit.

Kasim: 00:06:01

If I'm buying a dress and all I see is a dress that's sterile, there's

Kasim: 00:06:05

nothing I'm gonna connect to.

Kasim: 00:06:06

But if I see a person in that dress now there's empathy there.

Kasim: 00:06:09

And so lifestyle images are phenomenally important.

Kasim: 00:06:11

And with ai, mid journey, man, you can put anybody in any dress, you can

Kasim: 00:06:15

come up with a whole host of avatars, offer mid journey, the product that

Kasim: 00:06:19

you want to populate and then have it create those images for you.

Kasim: 00:06:22

There's no excuse not to have it.

Kasim: 00:06:23

Now.

Kasim: 00:06:23

Performance max AI driven advertising.

Kasim: 00:06:28

Google likes to sell your own traffic back at you.

Kasim: 00:06:30

So a lot of remarketing, lot of brand very unwieldy, hard to manage.

Kasim: 00:06:34

It's interstellar space.

Kasim: 00:06:35

Travel, the speed of light.

Kasim: 00:06:36

So you're like, Hey, let's try Zoom.

Kasim: 00:06:38

And then Google's like, we're there and you're like, this

Kasim: 00:06:39

isn't where I wanted to go.

Kasim: 00:06:40

But now you're 4 billion light years away.

Kasim: 00:06:43

There's a ton of junk traffic inside of Performance Maxs,

Kasim: 00:06:45

especially for lead generation, that you have to be careful of.

Kasim: 00:06:47

There's ways to fix that, but it's still a problem.

Kasim: 00:06:50

One of the best ways is what we call a cost flag trap.

Kasim: 00:06:53

I didn't name that by the way the team at tier 11 did.

Kasim: 00:06:55

But you create a conversion event that would be the default

Kasim: 00:06:59

conversion event and leads to.

Kasim: 00:07:00

Conversion that you're not tracking.

Kasim: 00:07:02

So for example, you have like asking for lead gen.

Kasim: 00:07:04

You're asking somebody to fill out a form and the default option of the first form

Kasim: 00:07:08

field, like the dropdown, is an option that no real lead would ever select.

Kasim: 00:07:11

Well, the bots and the click farm select that because they lead

Kasim: 00:07:14

the defaults in place, generally speaking, and they go off to dead

Kasim: 00:07:17

lead land and they don't get tracked.

Kasim: 00:07:19

That's one way of many to protect yourself from this spam traffic problem.

Kasim: 00:07:22

But that's not even the biggest problem in performance Max.

Kasim: 00:07:24

Performance Max is.

Kasim: 00:07:25

it over-indexes to where Google wants to sell inventory instead of necessarily

Kasim: 00:07:29

where the most valuable inventory is.

Kasim: 00:07:30

The way to, prevent that is to run campaigns in the channels

Kasim: 00:07:34

that you wanna make sure Google Will push Performance Max.

Kasim: 00:07:36

So if you want Performance Max to go into the shopping feed, then you have

Kasim: 00:07:39

to run a standard shopping campaign.

Kasim: 00:07:40

So Performance Max will go and steal from that standard shopping campaign.

Kasim: 00:07:42

I know that's massively counterintuitive.

Kasim: 00:07:44

It's so weird.

Kasim: 00:07:45

Like Performance Max will not go into shopping until I run a shopping campaign.

Kasim: 00:07:49

Then Performance Max goes into shopping.

Kasim: 00:07:50

So my shopping campaign looks like it's not performing, but it's there

Kasim: 00:07:52

as a leash kind of, , so I can pull Performance Maxs in that way.

Kasim: 00:07:55

When it succeeds, it does so spectacularly.

Kasim: 00:07:58

When it fails, it does so spectacularly.

Kasim: 00:08:00

So be careful with Pmax at a certain point it's all we're gonna have left.

Kasim: 00:08:03

Like Google's, slowly just, that's killing by the way.

Kasim: 00:08:07

It's like knocking down campaigns, taking 'em away from US app campaigns.

Kasim: 00:08:11

I don't run these, for whatever reason, I haven't gotten these customers.

Kasim: 00:08:14

I also think they're probably just easier.

Kasim: 00:08:16

I.

Kasim: 00:08:16

I don't think people need to hire an agency to run an app campaign.

Kasim: 00:08:18

If you got a mobile app, go run an app campaign.

Kasim: 00:08:21

Super linear, very easy to set up.

Kasim: 00:08:22

And neither do they work or they don't.

Kasim: 00:08:23

Conversion tracking is one of the easiest points of conversion in

Kasim: 00:08:26

the whole Google Ads ecosystem.

Kasim: 00:08:28

So I don't even know if I would tell people to run, the only time we've ever

Kasim: 00:08:30

run app campaigns is if they've been part of a larger, there's somebody has a.

Kasim: 00:08:34

Whatever it is.

Kasim: 00:08:35

we ran one for an LMS company that also had an app.

Kasim: 00:08:39

So we're trying to sell the courses in the lms and then the app download

Kasim: 00:08:41

was just one of many, but if it's pure on app, man, don't hire an agency.

Kasim: 00:08:44

You don't need them.

Kasim: 00:08:45

There's 15 settings.

Kasim: 00:08:47

Local campaigns, they usually used to be real.

Kasim: 00:08:49

We used to actually have local campaigns and then Google killed local for

Kasim: 00:08:52

performance max and they're garbage right now, but hopefully they get better.

Kasim: 00:08:55

Local campaigns used to crush, man, they were so good.

Kasim: 00:08:58

And you know, now Google's trying to put everything into one bottle, and

Kasim: 00:09:02

it sucks because it hurt the, the businesses that were the most at risk.

Kasim: 00:09:07

And now Performance Max as a local campaign, it just goes haywire.

Kasim: 00:09:10

It massively overreaches in so many ways.

Kasim: 00:09:12

I've told our smaller clients not to run it just don't discovery campaigns

Kasim: 00:09:16

I love discovery because this is where you can really go to Massively

Kasim: 00:09:21

explode the top of the funnel.

Kasim: 00:09:22

Google does a good job at putting your product or service in front

Kasim: 00:09:24

of people that would potentially be interested in your product or service.

Kasim: 00:09:26

They do a great job at that.

Kasim: 00:09:27

However, you need a budget.

Kasim: 00:09:29

You need a budget in order to run discovery campaigns cuz they

Kasim: 00:09:30

take time to build awareness.

Kasim: 00:09:32

that's not because the advertising mechanism takes time.

Kasim: 00:09:34

That's because awareness takes time, right?

Kasim: 00:09:36

Like people getting acclimated to a narrative that takes time.

Kasim: 00:09:39

And then local service ads.

Kasim: 00:09:40

These are the Google guaranteed ads that you see at the top.

Kasim: 00:09:42

When you search for specific industries, I've never run these.

Kasim: 00:09:45

I think they work really well based on what I've heard.

Kasim: 00:09:48

I'd love to know what y'all think.

Kasim: 00:09:49

I don't think there's anything to set up or optimize.

Kasim: 00:09:51

It's like thumbtack.

Kasim: 00:09:52

You go in, you tell Google like 10 pieces of information and then Google.

Kasim: 00:09:56

Places you're at.

Kasim: 00:09:57

So don't need an agency for this either.

Kasim: 00:09:59

it's interesting how many of these account types you don't need agencies for.

Kasim: 00:10:02

I'm gonna start polishing my resume.

Kasim: 00:10:04

That's it.

Kasim: 00:10:05

What did I miss?

Kasim: 00:10:06

What do you do?

Kasim: 00:10:06

How do you do it?

Kasim: 00:10:07

Tell me.

Kasim: 00:10:08

I'd love to know.

Kasim: 00:10:08

Thanks for watching.