If you’re spending most of your ad dollars on top-of-the-funnel campaigns, you’re missing out on the huge gains that wait at the bottom. In this article, we are bringing you the top Google Ads tips to use in 2022 shared by Maor Benaim. Maor is one of the most respected online marketers from Israel who has built multiple million-dollar businesses as an affiliate with his agency and building brands.
Maor shares his expertise and uncovers the biggest reason why marketers lose within Google campaigns, his rule of thumb for campaign testing that yields accurate results, what works for him, and what he advises marketers to implement in 2022 if they want to see results.
"Everything that you see here was tested with my own money or consultations in account audits that I've done. So this is not stuff that I found all over the internet — this is stuff that I tested myself. This is what I do day in and day out." Maor Benaim.
1. Overbidding at the Start
So the first one would be to make sure that you overbid to crush and bully the competition within the search campaigns. You want to make sure that you raise the bids by a lot. What happens there is that you get high-quality traffic right from the start.
2. Using Soft Conversions (Secondary Conversions)
Maor says that soft conversions are not being used right now by a lot of people. Usually, when he audits an account, he can easily tell that someone is using Facebook marketing tactics on Google Ads because people who come from Facebook usually just optimize on the end of the funnel, like at the checkout or the purchase stage of the funnel. The thing with Google ads and native ads is that you need a lot more data points to help the algorithm know which people will convert better.
A soft conversion is any conversion that happens between the first initial click and the purchase at the end. So it is any other conversion that you have set that is not the final purchase. It could be someone who adds to the cart, someone who initiates checkout, but it also could be if you don't have anything in between, someone who spends an amount of time on your website or scrolls down the page.
Benefits of Using Soft Conversions
- They help to speed up manual optimization
- They feed the traffic source algorithm with data points much faster.
Platforms like Outbrain, for example, allow you to add multiple conversions into a campaign. So it helps the system really understand who is likely to convert and it gives the system a lot more data points on how to find the correct users. You can also choose what conversion you want the system to optimize. So if you're going to use any type of automated bidding like target CPA, then the system would know what to optimize on.
If you have a Shopify store, you can just use the Google shopping app that would install all of the soft conversions in between add-to-carts and stuff like that. When you set up these conversions, you want to make sure that you distinguish between what's called including all conversions, or a primary and a secondary conversion.
When you set them up on Google, you need to make sure that you distinguish between a checkout purchase, which is supposed to be a primary conversion, and a secondary conversion, which is a soft conversion.
3. Remarketing
Maor says that the biggest thing he keeps seeing marketers do is spending so much money on top of funnel traffic instead of squeezing everything from the bottom of the funnel.
"My rule of thumb when I test campaigns is that I do not open any type of top funnel traffic or any type of new top of funnel campaigns till I see that the bottom of funnel remarketing campaigns works. If they don't, then I change the angle, change the ads, change the landing page, until I get it right," Maor says.
Tips On Creating Great Remarketing Campaigns
- Set up your audience library correctly by segmenting events
Maor says that what he does before setting up any campaign is ensure that he opens up all of the audience segments and sets the audience library correctly. The segments could be generic stuff like people who initiated the checkout, people who added to the cart, UTMs, and so on. It could even be people who spend a decent amount of time on his website or view products and so on. He then segments them out by the number of days for his sales cycle, it could be anywhere from 70 to 180 days.
So he ensures that he makes the most out of remarketing to these audience segments before advancing to the top of the funnel remarketing.
- Running a search campaign first while remarketing
Maor suggests that if you want to squeeze every profit that you can from your traffic, it’s better that you first start with a Google search campaign. When marketers are running any type of traffic even from Facebook or native ads where they can buy cheap impressions, the brands that they are marketing start to do a lot more branded and non-branded searches on Google. People nowadays are smart; they like to go and research and go through the whole research and discovery loop via Google. So they're going to see your ad on a discovery platform like Instagram and then they're going to search for your brand via Google.
So it's important to retarget these people using Google search ads or else you could easily lose your interested audience/ potential customers. So that's why when it comes to remarketing, running Google search campaigns should never be neglected.
- Using different creatives at each stage of a remarketing campaigns
Maor also advises marketers to create and use different creatives for each stage of their remarketing campaigns. Usually, many average marketers launch marketing campaigns that typically use similar creatives. You want to make sure that you approach the audience in a different way at different stages of your funnel. For example in top-of-the-funnel campaigns, you don't have to tell them again what your name is and what you do. You’d want to take another approach. If the main reason that you have for people not converting is the pricing, make sure that you approach that in a different way. Create urgency in a sale, something like that.
"I also suggest you open up a remarketing campaign within all of the networks so Search, Video, Discovery, and Display because you don't know what's going to work. Sometimes people guess and say that maybe video is the right thing, but honestly, you cannot know what's going to work. So, if you have a lot of traffic coming in even if it's just from one source you wanna make sure that you segment or open up the campaigns and audiences that are closest to the end of the funnel.", Maor explains.
4. Taking advantage of Youtube discovery campaigns
People don't remember or don't realize that YouTube is the second largest search engine out there and it is extremely big. The reason why people miss the fact that you can use YouTube as a search engine and just get search traffic from it is that they cannot choose the search placement when making Youtube Ads–but there is a way around that.
When you open up a campaign within Google in a regular way, it asks you what type of campaign you are going to open up. Usually, people choose one or the other, and then you can choose the specific network. When you go into the targeting inside that campaign, you do not have the ability to exclude or choose a specific placement within Youtube.
But if you go into the campaign creation dashboard and you choose to create a campaign without a goal's guidance, you're going to have the ability to choose only youtube search.
The ads inside the Youtube search results would look something like in the image below.
With Youtube, you can choose to be aggressive with the thumbnails, the headlines, and the descriptions and you can just do stuff that even native platforms wouldn't allow. So what you really do is A/B test the CTR and stuff like that.
How to Take Advantage of Youtube Search Campaigns
There are two ways that Maor suggests can help advertisers to take advantage of Youtube search campaigns.
- Using Custom Intent Audiences
The biggest thing people miss when they try to open up a custom intent audience is that when you try to create it, the default option is the first option you see, the option that's not marked for people with any of these interests or purchase intentions.
"What I do want you to choose, just because we're doing a search engine approach, is the second one, which is for people who search for any of these terms inside Google. Okay, so we're going to take from the search campaign the keywords that just converted the most. Do some keyword research and make sure that you get them inside." Maor says.
If you want to crush it with Youtube, then you need to take advantage of keyword targeting in Youtube search campaigns. When people use Youtube, they usually search for how-to videos. So if you have a specific brand, a specific product, or service that helps with a certain thing and you are able to produce creatives that would approach that how-to angle, you need to explore this.
You can start by targeting people who are looking for how to build something, how to protect my car, how to lose weight, and things like that would really tap into the search audience. So you would get people not just like watching your ad but also want to watch your ad because they are going to see it within the search results and it gives them a solution. So it's just like tapping into the Youtube search market.
5. Using Youtube Channel and Video Targeting
This is a really nice way of opening up a YouTube campaign without spending a lot of money or waiting a long time for the system to optimize. Normally, when you open up any campaign, you are going to use similar audiences or even market audiences, but at the end of the day, YouTube channels are just the equivalent of a white list in natives ads or just like a specific placement inside the display network.
So if you know that you are doing a phone campaign, then you would search for the specific youtube channels that are related to your audience, and then just start to target them. You can go into youtube or you can use the Google system and just copy and paste the URLs from youtube into the system and you want to get like a nice balance between the number of subscribers and the video views that that channel has and start to really you know to grab that audience because you kind of like help Google look for people who are interested. People who are searching for reviews for that specific phone are probably considering buying that phone or TV or whatever, so you are going to go into that video channel.
- Use the data from your campaigns to scale into more targeted channels
If you see a specific channel that brings two, three, or four conversions, it's enough to open up just like a campaign with dedicated channels, so you can do like five, ten, or fifteen channels and just take over them because you know that your audience is there, your audience is converting there, so the goal is essentially just like optimizing according to the channels and analytics that you have.
- Use Youtube Video Targeted Campaigns
So just like the channels approach, if you know that there is a specific channel that is working for you and you know that there is a specific video that's currently exploding, you want to just buy all the media inside and takeover it in terms of bidding.
6. Using Google Suggested Audience Targeting
This is a nice feature that Google recently added that can help advertisers to search for new audiences. It also works well if you already have an account that's been running for a while and has some conversion data. There are two ways of getting new ideas on what to target with Google suggested audience targeting which are:
- Search based
This allows you to get information on your past click performance but also information from advertisers. How you open that up is when you launch a campaign or when you again tell the audience's tab and you want to target different ones, you just start writing something inside the search box, something like "shop" or "shoppers" and then you will have stuff that is like advertisers like you and based on your past click performance, that's a big thing.
- Insight based
The other way to kind of like find new audiences would be through the audience's insights. Make sure when you go into the audience manager, you go into the audience insights tab and you choose a specific audience segment, which is something people tend to miss, and you get to see what are the closest in-market or affinity audiences that you have.
"My rule of thumb here would be targeting anything that has an above 3x index, even if it doesn't make sense. Sometimes you would have people that are searching for trips to Japan, for example, but that's still something that the system kind of sees a correlation between people who converted and people who are likely to convert with you."
Conclusion
Maor says that keeping up with such advertising hacks and tricks is one of the biggest reasons that have kept him thriving in this industry throughout the tough times over the years.
If you know of other hacks that helped you improve performance, let us know in the comments below which other hacks you think marketers should use in 2022.
