to make Google Ads Brand Campaigns more effective //

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your Google Ads campaigns?

We have used Google Ads to acquire customers as a European fintech company. We found initial success using Google’s impression target share for brand campaigns.

In 2023, however, we questioned the status quo, focusing on profitability. Our hypothesis was that we could lower CPCs while still retaining traffic and conversions.

This article examines PPC inefficiencies and suggests a restructuring strategy. This article aims to inspire changes that will improve efficiency and allow for savings to be re-invested in new business acquisition.

Challenge the status quo

All queries aren’t created equal. Not all keywords are created equal.

Google has been pushing for more reach and less management over the past few years.

When you select broad match, your generic keywords will be positioned on the brand queries of your competitors.

Chances are, if you do it to someone else, they will likely do it to you. I’m assuming that Performance Max will also follow this path.

There are some negative effects of this on the brand campaign:

• Smart bidding without a CPC maximum can capture your important brand traffic, because we know Google can set nerve-wracking CPCs on any query.
• Even if the competition was unlikely to win the auction, the CPC of the winner will increase.
• A campaign that aims to achieve a target impression share with mixed match types will push CPCs well beyond their limits. This is because phrase matches can be used for queries that are largely irrelevant, but still reach the 100% impression goal on all keywords.

Identification of a “non-existent” problem

We can predict how we will perform in search when everything is stable, but not what we will do if things change.

To bring this project into reality, we needed to combine two things: data and trust. Faith is harder to find than data.

Many people like to pretend that searching can be scientific. Even so, a statistical model cannot always take into account all of the factors that impact a particular account.

We shouldn’t, however, be inertia-bound due to our data dependence. You must sometimes be bold.

Analysing and proposing a project

Our team extracted the top brand keywords for each week, along with the usual KPIs like impressions, clicks and conversions. We also included competitive metrics such as click share (impressions share, first page position, and overall click share).

Excel allows us to create all necessary calculations, and then recalculate them. This allows us to segment data as we wish.

CPC = Cost per Click

CTR = Impressions / Clicks

CVR = Clicks/Conversions

CPA = Cost/Conversions

The calculation of impression share metrics is a bit more difficult because they are already averages and need to be converted into brute calculations before being recalculated within a pivot chart.

As a rule, we multiply impression share metrics with impressions and divide the result by impressions after creating the pivot table.

Two categories of keywords were immediately apparent.

• Low CPCs and low CPAs (CPCs are relatively high for brand campaigns)
• CPCs that are close to those of generic campaigns (CPCs)

Both scored 99% for all metrics of impression share. We noted that the performance CPA for the second category was closer to generic keyword than the first.

We were encouraged that this could lead to an overall increase in ROI. We were unable to estimate an increase in ROI. We have gathered all the decision makers and presented our case.

Solution: Divide the campaigns in two and provide a strategy that is relevant.

We split the categories into two separate campaigns. We could optimize CPCs for the category that performed better, while turning the second category into an performance campaign by using smart bidding based on conversion objectives.

We did not want to lose all of the historical data so we kept the first campaign and created a new one for the second.

On the first category, we kept the target impression; however, it was reduced to 95%. We also set up a Max CPC. In the second category we set up the average CPA of the first 30 days and then created a tCPA campaign with a maximum CPC.

Saving thousands and improving ROI

Results were instantaneous. Our CPCs for the first category fell by -73%. We didn’t lose any competitive metrics, except for a few percentage points.

Google made us pay more for some reason than we would have otherwise paid, even though our target impression share strategy was the same. Second category saw improvement.

CPCs fell by -31%. We did however lose 7 percentage points on the click share. We expected this because our goal is to increase conversions and not clicks.

Google has stopped positioning for some search queries. In the second category we use the bid strategy calculator to calculate the incremental cost of conversions.

Google estimates that if we increased our tCPA to a staggering level, we could get 2-3 more conversions. If we captured all traffic, our returns would quickly fall off a cliff.

Google Ads: Lower CPCs and higher conversions

We have been able to directly increase our budget for new business acquisition. Imagine spending 75% less per week, month or year on brand keywords.

The savings can be huge depending on the size and scope of your company. Now we must prepare for a new world where brand inquiries are no longer safe.

Smart bidding is a great way to increase your chances of winning, but you must also be critical of what’s happening with search.

We must be loyal as PPC marketers and improve our performance no matter what the company, client, platform or so-called best practice is.

The article Make your Google Ads Brand Campaigns more effective first appeared on Search Engine land.