How to Stay Ahead in Google Ads: AI, Incrementality & Smart Strategy

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy breaks down the biggest PPC shifts coming your way—from AI tools and cross-channel integration to incrementality testing and campaign structure revamps. 

Learn why isolating your Google Ads data no longer cuts it, how to find true value in your ad spend, and what smart marketers are doing post-click to drive serious results. If you want to stay ahead in a rapidly changing landscape, this one’s for you!

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Google Ads unleashed. Guys. Hope everyone is doing fantastically this Monday, and I'm doing really well because I'm really looking forward to what this year, the next year has in store first, because what happens PPC is a very quickly changing landscape, right? You have to keep on top of so many trends. You have to keep on top of so many changes Google Ads makes. You have to react to them, right? Because I know this is something that a cliche that people say that, or you have to always keep on top of industry changes, and sometimes, yeah, that is a little bit over top, because if you don't miss, like, the latest p max update with one feature, then screw it right, like it's not the end of the world. However, there are forces at play at the moment where you have to react. Alexa, stop.
There are forces at play at the moment where you have to react in order to survive, because if you're not going to adapt. You're going to be left behind many of these things. Of instance, AI, right? AI is going to be huge, and it's going to massively speed up your your processes. It's massively going to speed up like how you do PPC, right? It's never going to replace us, but you have to sort of already start incorporating it into your into your workflow. But other things also, what this means is that you have to start diversifying massively on how you sort of add value to businesses that you work with. And that's why I always like to learn myself, right? Like, although I do the pod and teach a lot of people about PPC, I don't have, you know, I don't have, like, a sort of like, I don't have all the wisdom, right? Like, you always want to learn, and that's why a very good friend and a client of ours and I went to hero conf in Brighton on last week. So we went up there Thursday evening. I went there for the party, and the party was insane. So if any PPC is a listening you partly hard so well done. But secondly, on the Friday, we really attended a few very interesting and juicy talks. And I want to not only tease that there's going to be some guests from the hero conf on this podcast very soon, but I also want to take away a couple of the sort of core things that you will want to look at, if you don't want to be getting left behind in PPC, and what I think is going to shape the very near future. And maybe on top of that, I just want to say I did like a little review on Brighton SEO, which is part of the hero conf last year when I attended and I wasn't really too impressed with sort of the quality of the talks. Then there was one gentleman then who did really well, who I actually saw again last Friday, and who again delivered an insane presentation. But I don't want to spoil it too much, but I think if, if you go to any of these events, then you really have to go to PPC specific one and not sort of an industry wider one, because that is where the juicy talks and the cool insights happen. And I want to start with the one of the first talks that I sort of hear from a lady called Sarah Clark, and she talked about data isolation, integration, the future of effective media planning and strategy. So basically, this is one trend has already been, I say trend, but it's already one thing that has been happening for a very long time, and that is that the more effective businesses have almost regressed in the last years in a positive way. What do I mean by that? When you did media buying a 2018 right? Let's say 2017 you had almost like full visibility on the data. You also had what I, in my opinion, the funnel, however you want to define, that was a lot less linear as well, right? Sorry, was a lot more linear. I had a feeling that consumers. The time, were happy to very quickly just make purchasing decisions, and that life was a little bit easier. You had for more visibility on tracking. There was very few models to choose from in terms of attribution. Anyway, you kind of chose the best one that went with your business, and that was it, right. Of course, you still at your CEOs or CFOs, or, sorry, CMOs or CFOs, look at sort of the overall figures of the business, etc, and how marketing incorporates into that. But times are easier, right? You were just plugging in your PPC ads and optimizing on a certain CPA or ROAs, and that was the end of it. This has changed massively, right, not only with the advent of iOS 14, but also with how more complex everything has become in the last years. You must not look at PPC or Google ads if one part of PVC is isolated channels, you have to bring it all together. So if you want to be a good Google Ads media buyer, you must, must, must be able to integrate your entire strategy into the overall strategy your client is running. You must be able to advise them how Google fits in the mix, how much it takes is part of the consumer journey. How to optimize that part of the consumer journey, you have to understand how it integrates with the channels. You have to understand, potentially even marketing mix modeling, right? So if you want to really upgrade, you will have to take that sort of strategic step and really learn how all the data works together, and you must, must not look at all of your data in isolation, right? That's why, with almost all of our clients, has very few exceptions. The ones which are exceptions are where Google Ads the only channel because, interestingly, attribution works pretty well then because, of course, there aren't any other contributing factors through which, you know, there's any sort of form of interaction, right? So you're more than happy to just use Google and the Google sort of interface in order to judge performance. But with almost all of our other clients, we use either get CLA, or we use triple whale, or we use ad metrics, or any form of, actually a kick byte, done a very cool episode once with binswagens, the owner of kick bite, we use a form of, sort of a data warehousing tool, if you, if you like, a BI tool, to understand how the consumer journey looks like and how we should be spending on various channels. And you should be doing that as well, because without you, are going to go under then, I think the next talk, which I found super, super interesting, was I listened to a lady called Ellie Connor who talked about how to combine PPC and SEO for win and search strategies. Now, overall, a lot of the stuff was pretty well known to me anyway, generally speaking, there is very often a sort of a false assumption. I've had this so many times in the past, when working with other SEOs, or when working with a business that had an SEO or with a business owner who said, Oh, why don't we find out where we are lacking currently in terms of organic listings, and we fill those keywords, those search terms with with PPC, and then the rest, we're going to get free traffic anyway, wrong, right? Generally speaking, they complement each other. Think of it as follows, how often have you looked for service, right? Maybe you've done this, but I do this all the time, right? How often have you looked for a service or for a product, etc? And you actually see them in the PVC search results. You skim over it, and then suddenly they're in the top three of the organic listings as well. That is social proof, right? Suddenly you're taking more actual ad real estate, which, of course, is mega, mega important. Because in the end, I think it was my friend Steve will love me for this, that that I remember his name, a gentleman called Byron sharp, check him out. Wrote fantastic books, but in the end, his concept was that in order to dominate marketing, you have to fill up two, two versions of ad real estate. First of all, actual physical ad real estate, right? You have to be physically. Present. Think of your supermarkets, right? If your supermarket were 100 miles away, you wouldn't drive there, right? You would go to the closest, although maybe the supermarket of your preference is 100 miles away, right? So you you wouldn't drive there every day, even if you need a small thing, you go to places where there's convenience, right, where there's distribution. So actual distribution and actual visibility is one huge part of success. And if you dominate the SERP with your paid results, your own shopping, you're in search. You're not an organic listings a holy shit, right? Like that. That is, is where it all comes together. That's that. That's, that's the brilliant part.
But secondly, you also have to dominate mental real estate, right? So if you are the leading supplier for printers, of course, what comes to mind, brother, HP, etc, etc. People associate a brand instantly with that. So that's a massive part of marketing as well. Anyway, I digress. The whole point is, is that you want to be dominating at real estate, but you want to, obviously work with the SEOs to understand, for instance, what kind of search terms work well and are worth working on. You may want to find certain long tail searches that you can collaborate with the SEO on in order to, of course, drive up revenue for your business or for your clients, right? So that's so that was a really cool talk. So generally, that sort of goes back to what I said. The previous point is sort of integrating channels with each other, right? Happens too little, and I think more should be done in in that regard. And we don't do enough of it, then we have a bit of a break. But I think my favorite talks then came, which were in the afternoon, and these are the gentlemen's I'm really, really hoping I can get onto the podcast. And the first one was by a chap called Liam Wait, and he his talk was on demystifying incrementality for paid media and beyond. So first of all, what is incrementality? I'm going to do full podcast on this anyway, because arguably, this is one of the trends that are going to be even more important in 2025 and beyond, because for using all the aforementioned stuff that I said right in terms of, for instance, that you have to integrate your paid strategy in with other channels, that you have to do this, that you have to do that. I think you gain an edge nowadays if you can zoom out and understand what causes what right and what is actually really driving revenue, what is just fluff, right? And the and that is what sort of incrementality is about. And I think the more difficult the auction is getting, the more more expensive the auction is getting, the more competitive they are, the more difficult the PPC landscape, or the digital marketing landscape becomes, the more important it is to gain an edge on sort of a strategic level, to not only understand Vincennes channels work with each other, etc, which is how you really drive value, but also understanding what is what you're doing actually adding incremental value to your business. What is the sweet spot in, for instance, budgets in for your advertising, and anything above that is it just wasted money. Is brand search really working, right? What impact does YouTube have on your business, although it's not measurable on the platform? I talk about this all the time, right? My last podcast was about whether to brand search or not, right? You can easily test this and check its in incrementality. So that means, does it add incremental value to your business? If everything were turned off and only this were left on, would that be adding additional revenue, or would the business just carry on as usual, anyway, even if all other ads were off. And yeah, you want to. And you can test this, for instance, with brand switch quite easily, right? So you could do, for instance, let's say you advertise in the UK, and you've got a brand switch campaign running. It's been running forever, spends two grand a month or something like that? Just take your average number of orders from, let's say Scotland, right, that you get in a month. Let's say it's 100 orders from Scotland in a month, and just turn off brand search if all of if there are many factors that. Speak for you, being able to turn it off right, and if, in the following month, with a pretty similar month, you still get 100 orders from Scotland. Very likely it hasn't really had a massive impact. Very likely you've just saved two grand, and all the money that you're spending is not really adding incremental value to your business. So Liam really broke this down? Well, first, I hope he's going to break it down even better, because although I have sort of been deep, diving into this topic, quite a bit, it still alludes me to a certain degree, and I need to really, sort of fortify my knowledge in that. But the idea is pretty straightforward, understanding what is really adding to the bottom line of your business and and what, what, what you can do to do that. Then the next talk was super interesting, which sort of really, really dovetailed with it, which is about incrementality testing. How can you actually test the impact of certain things like this, and I just sort of mentioned one way, but there's many other ways as well. We're going back to the concept of, like, mental real estate, right, which I told you about before. So it's going to be more accessible than ever. With Google, you'll be able to do Brand Lift studies, right? Probably seen this before, where you watch a YouTube video and it asks you, or have you seen an ad from Danone or something like that in the last five days? And you say yes or no, and with that, you can really understand what kind of lift this sort of brings to your business. You can do the AB test studies, which I've just mentioned, right? Like, you can sort of turn your ads off in a certain region to understand what kind of impact it has. You could use post purchase survey data to understand what kind of impact your advertising has. You could do blackout studies, right? So turn ads off completely in a certain area and see what, what, what kind of impact it has, etc, etc. So gave me a lot of ideas which we're going to be implementing with clients of ours as well. So that has been really cool, and it has been quite, quite the eye opener. So I will definitely do more of that in the business going forward and lastly, not lastly, in the same session. So there's two more we had actually a gentleman from Google called Clinton cooler make a presentation, and he talked about UX improvements and what kind of incremental value that adds to your Google ads. So the he made us aware of an update in February, which I wasn't aware that Google will now consider the navigability difficult word of your website for the quality score as well, including your shopping ads. And that may explain why, in some accounts, with poorer websites, there has actually been a sort of a little bit of a regression since February, and maybe a rise in CPCs because of exactly that, and realistically, again, it's one of the things that is so obvious, but too few people really do it. He mentioned a stat to me when I talked to him in person. He said, only 15% of marketers think post click, right? That's a disaster, right? Post click is your biggest friend. How often have I talked on this podcast about, you know, sometimes maybe your focus on Google should be beyond what beyond the platform. 70% of your success is what happens beyond the platform, right? How much? How good is your product? How good is your offer? How good is your user design, etc, etc. You don't always have to drive more traffic. You just have to convert it better, right? So him making this quite sort of obvious and sort of reinforcing that, and also reinforcing that Google value is this, right? Google is really, really, really, sort of keen on getting people to improve their websites and user experiences, because they realize themselves that, you know, this is such an important part of the user journey, and they want to sort of obviously give people the opportunity to, you know, gain an edge If they actually provide good user experience, right?
So that was great. And then the last one was absolutely mind boggling. Was from a gentleman called in the Paul Rai who I've heard a talk of last year already, and who I'm very, very hopeful to have on the podcast as well. And. Um, and more or less, he presented a case study of a very large SKU business and how He not only filtered the data and the products for the right campaign setup, and I've done tons of pods already about various filtering options and various segmentation options for better success, but also how he integrated that, for instance, with seasonality data, and he integrated it also with offline conversion data, right? Which was absolutely insane. It was so cool, more or less. What happened was a big business came to them said, we've got 350,000 products. We don't know how to segment our campaigns. Nothing makes sense to us, right? And nothing's working best. So what they've done is segment, sort of a hero, zombie, potential product, other products, like unprofitable products, so sort of unprofitable products, profitable products, zombie products, hopeful products, and like another segment, and in the end, what they've done is segment those into various campaigns, integrate offline Conversion Tracking as well, because that particular client actually only made various sort of, like, only made commission on the sales of these products. So the commission was different, so they integrated that. And it was just mind boggling, right, how they put it together? And it was really cool. I think the biggest thing was to Oh, yeah. And they also segmented products by seasonality that, for instance, only come out for Mother's Day, Father's Day, etc, etc, to be able to create custom filters for those, the custom labels for those products to then make campaign specific to those so really, really interesting talks, and it just goes to show, I think, to summarize it all as follows, is just be a good marketer, right? Understand, how does Google fit into the user journey? How much value do I really add with just pump in the budgets. Or is it much better if you can tell a client, hey, you know you're overspending here and here and here with say, and we could save a lot of money, right? How much value can I add by looking beyond the user journey right on Google and look on what happens on the site. How much value can I add by thinking cleverly about my own data and to use their own data to improve my ad strategy? Okay? And I think that was really important to sort of see what other people are doing and to take those insights away. And I'm hoping that I can share those insights with me very soon in certain parts, but I'll also continue to share these insights with you here anyway. Feel free to subscribe. Would love to if you could give the pod some love. You could also always follow up with me personally. If you want to talk more about this, it's Jeremy and Google ads on LinkedIn. You'll also can email me at Jeremy, at Union digital dot marketing, or head to the website younger digital marketing, which where you can just book a one to one call with me. We'd love to chat to you. And on this note, I wish you hopefully a very, very nice week. Maybe you got some inspiration from this. Let me know, and I'll see you in the next podcast. Bye.