The Brand Campaign Hack That Saved Our Clients Thousands

In this weeks episode of the Google Ads Unleashed podcast discover how to save thousands on your brand campaigns with Jeremy's game-changing brand campaign hack. 

Host Jeremy shares a proven method that recently helped a client reduce ad spend by 70%. Learn how to optimise your campaigns, minimise CPCs, and maximise ROI. 

Note: This is a reuploaded episode while Jeremy is away on his honeymoon — but it's a hidden gem you may have missed the first time around! Packed with insights on how to use post-purchase data to boost your Shopping Ads performance. Usual episodes will return shortly.

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 well, and this week, I'm coming out with a practical tip again, because we've done a lot of interviews, and I just want to help you get the most bang for your buck with all of your campaigns, and one, which is a tip that we've rolled out across a lot, a lot a lot of accounts recently, is one which you are going to love, and potentially you are going to save a ton of money. So this is a tip that we've rolled out with one of our clients, for instance, at the end of July, and now it's almost the end of August, and we already saved him about 7000 euros close to that in ad spend. And the trick that I'm talking about is choosing the right bidding strategy for your brand campaigns. Now I've got a full on episode about brand campaigns, why they're important, why they should be done, etc, etc, but generally speaking, a lot of people choose the wrong bidding strategy for their brand campaigns. Why is that so? First of all, I think it's because Google's default bidding strategy settings very often favor Max conversion value or max conversions. And I'm going to say an unpopular opinion now here at first, there is nothing wrong with that at the beginning, right? You are absolutely okay to actually choose those because especially when you set up an account new the it is a good way, really, to just get some traction going, right? Also, it's one to not really you one you don't really have to think about, right? So sets Max conversions, and that's what you want for an on your brand traffic. You want to maximize the number of conversions for, for for that campaign type. So generally speaking, that's fine. However, what what happens is that Google does the following. Over time, you will see that even maybe, if there's no one else in the auction, right, so there's not even Amazon in the auction, there's no competitor bid in on your ad, on your brand name, you will see that there will be still higher than normal CPCs. So in theory, you're only meant to pay if all everything else is equal, let's say landing page, experience, quality, score, all this sort of stuff. You are meant to only pay exactly one pence or cent, or whatever, more than your competitor if you are bidding on the same keyword or even your brand keyword, right? So in theory, if absolutely no one else is there in the auction, and you're the only one bidding on your brand, then you should be paying one pence a click. That doesn't happen, though, very often times you'll see that you might be even paying dozens of pence or even several pounds per click. Now this can happen if your brand name contains, for instance, a very generic word. One of our clients sells travel pillow. Travel pillows, for instance, and his brand name literally contains the word travel pillow. So as a by default. Even when someone searches for his brand, they will trigger generic searches from other advertisers as well, which is why his branded campaigns are quite aggressive, right? So his branded or like sort of spend is quite high because he always competes with other people who might even unintentionally bid in on is on his brand search, right? So as a result, CPCs are quite high. That's where it's fine to have certain bidding strategies which are, let's put like this a little bit more aggressive in order to win auctions. On the other hand, if you see that only Amazon or maybe you yourself are in the auction, Google will artificially inflate your CPCs when given the chance. Why does Google do that? First of all, the decks, right? So they they try to satisfy the shareholders and maximize the money that they can get from you as an advertiser. And they've long realized that branded search is a huge, huge pool of where money could be made, which is why, for instance, also, if you ever notice this, there might be advertisers bidding on your brand, and they might not even do it on purpose, because it's p max right. P max edges onto those types of auctions and and generally, can show ads on branded search without even meaning to that's why you've got brand exclusions also on p max to avoid exactly that. But what Google has done is to artificially the CPCs, to increase the size of your ad as well, because the size of your ad so the real estate that you take up on the SERP on the search engine rank and pay. Which is directly correlated with how much you're willing to bid. Okay, so you might be paying through the nose, then for branded clicks, which is just not necessary. So what is the remedy here? The remedy is a different bid strategy. So generally speaking, something that we've done with more or less all of our clients, which has become one of our default tests, is to test whether we can save some money on brand traffic by AB testing with a different bidding strategy. So there's a couple of favorites that we pick from. It depends on, sometimes a little bit on the goals, but generally speaking, one of the favorites that we have is manual CPC, which is a safe bet at any given point. Let's say, for instance, you pay one pound per brand to click, much, too much. So what you might want to do is set up in a an experiment, an AB test, which you can do in the Google Ads interface, and then test your max conversions, or your ROAs target, or your CPA target strategy versus a manual CPC. And oftentimes you'll see, if you set it at a third, at half, at maybe a quarter of the clicks CPCs that you bid in as your max bid, you will see not only barely any conversions, a conversion loss, right? Versus the the automated version, but also your CPCs will drop drastically, and you'll get more or less the same number of conversions like I just said, at a much, much cheaper CPA. We also test some other two strategies, sometimes as Max clicks with a bid cap, which basically does the same. And it also, we also do this sometimes with target impression share, right? So we might choose target impression shares a bit strategy, set it at 9095 plus percent, or close to 100 with a bit cap, and then we just let it rip. Especially we want brand search, then to be at the at the absolute top. Works a treat. Works really well. Like I said, with one client, we've saved 1000s of pounds. With another client, we've you'd think that there's not much to save. But for instance, this one partner of ours had a CPC of 17 cents, 17 cents only, and we got it down to five cents, right? So even there we over a year, that's hundreds, if not 1000s, of euros, right, which we saved for that give it a try, different brand, different basically, bidding strategy for your brand campaign, and you will be very surprised about the results, not only how much you save, but also potentially that it might even work better. That's some cases that we've had as well. If this has been a helpful tip for your brand, for e commerce brand, then please always, always reach out and continue listening and subscribing to the podcast for more expert advice and tips. You can always email me as well at Jeremy, at young and digital dot marketing, or you can find me on LinkedIn with Jeremy and Google ads. And you can also head to the website young and digital dot marketing to book a free consultation with me through my Calendly, whether it's PPC management you need help with maybe you need one on one coaching. That's something that we've recently launched. We are here to support your PPC growth and to make you the most money on Google ads. This has been Jeremy Young as always, every week, and I wish you a happy and successful week ahead and I hear you in the next episode. Bye, bye for now you.