Demand Gen Ads That Convert – Case Study & Webinar Announcement

Big news—Jeremy’s hosting a live webinar this Thursday 24th July with Product Hero, and you’re invited! Sign up now: https://producthero.webinargeek.com/how-to-start-demand-gen-the-right-way-a-proven-media-buying-framework-for-ecom-brands

In this episode, get a sneak peek of what he’ll be covering: how to launch high-converting Demand Gen campaigns, structure your YouTube and Discovery ads for success, and avoid common mistakes. Plus, hear a fresh case study that shows exactly what’s working right now. 

Don’t miss the webinar—it’s your chance to ask questions live and learn how to unlock growth with Google Ads' most underused campaign type.

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 everyone to another episode of Google Ads unleashed. Hope everyone is doing fine and fabulously this Monday morning, I have a big question appeal, whatever you want to call it to you this Thursday on the 24th of July, at 2pm I am actually hosting a webinar together with product hero, our CSS of choice. If you haven't checked them out, go to product hero.com and the topic of how to launch demand gen campaigns easily. And I have done one or two episodes on this subject before, but I feel still that this is a huge blue ocean for E commerce advertisers out there, and there's too little information on what good account structures or campaign structures look like. There's too little information on how you properly measure success. There's too little information on what kind of creatives work. And I'm going to try to sort of put a little bit light in the dark with a 15 minute presentation followed by 15 minutes Q and A session. There will be a link somewhere related to this episode where you can go and sign up, but please go onto product hero.com as well, onto their socials, onto our socials. You should know them. Jeremy and Google ads are LinkedIn, young and digital are marketing. And you will find out the sign up link everywhere. So if you want to be speaking to me this Thursday, 24th of July, 2pm please head to the webinar, looking forward to there, and this will also be the topic of the episode. Then how to launch demand gen campaigns properly? Because the reality is, first of all, YouTube is growing. If you actually look at the revenue data, if you look at the view data, it's insane. It's just going in one direction. I think there's many reasons for that. First of all, YouTube maturing as a platform. Of course, over time, there's lot more content now on there than it's ever been before. You can watch stuff live. You've got YouTube shorts, you've got just all of these very engaging ad formats. You also have phenomena of, you know, certain sports moving almost entirely there, right? And moving the market in there. Look at, I don't know, golf, for instance, right? How people are watching golf has changed massively. How people are watch have watched other sports has changed massively. So of course, there's more advertising revenue there, and YouTube has realized that it wasn't very good at monetizing this, and because it wasn't providing a lot of success for advertisers on there. So a lot of that has changed, and it's gotten a lot easier. It's also still a lot cheaper. So I've done a little bit of research on how expensive CPMs are in Northern America and in Europe, and the sort of my own research showed that CPMs is still 25% cheaper. At least some global comparisons say that CPMs on YouTube are even a quarter of what they are on meta ads. So it's still a blue ocean. There's tons and tons of ads real estate that can be bought up. And there's also a ton more watch time, because the average watch time of a YouTube ad is much longer than a meta ad, just because of the nature of the format, right? So not only are the CPMs cheaper, but obviously that sort of cost per view, if you like, is then a lot, lot cheaper as well. So you don't pay the same for the same view time you pay it like disproportionately less. So there's a ton, a ton of opportunity there still. And also, which is crazy most brands, especially you guys who are listening, especially the guys who I'll be talking to on Thursday, they are sitting on years and years and years of image and video creative, which they have not used ever, because at some point the creative burned out. Yeah, they've done maybe five or 10 iterations on that, but then they never did anything with that creative anymore, and the time has come for demand gen for this so as you probably know, demand gen is, as you've heard in previous episodes, now the compact campaign type that comprised what was formerly discovery ads, which were launched on Google, discover, Google, news, Gmail and certain other features. Is, for instance, on YouTube that is now a sort of an image ad type that has been served into into demand gen, as they call it now, and video faction campaigns. So they all classic video campaigns have been phased out, so your normal In Stream Ads and now shorts as well are also within dimension. So in theory, you could launch an image ad that is launched across several platforms at the same time. But that's where one of the first issues lies. It creates a lot of confusion, right? A lot of people are confused about how effective their ads are across different platforms. They're confused about what ad formats work. They're confused about a ton. So I'm going to break this down for everyone with a recent case study that we've done. So we've had a brand approach us many moons ago for a for an audit, and one of the biggest, I'd say, blue oceans for them still were demand gen campaigns. So we've been starting to work together. Two weeks ago, we've been launching demand gen campaigns in their ad accounts, and we actually our way forward was as follows. So first of all, you have to kind of first determine where the demand gen is for you. Usually there's a couple of barriers to entry here. Usually four barriers to entry. First of all, you need to have existing creative right. Without existing creative, you're going to run into the same issue that you've had before, that there's production costs involved. There's other costs involved. Then you may be scared of, you know, making 16 to nine videos, etc, without existing creative, you are screwed already. So you need creative that has converted on other platforms, then I would recommend that your demand capture channels are already maximized to a certain degree that you realize you've hit a ceiling. Okay. What do I mean by that is that very often you will run into this that based on your average order conversion rate margins, etc, at some point there's just not more people are searching for your stuff. You just can't spend more on search, on shopping, etc, right? That's just a matter of fact. So usually this comes with a spend threshold. Most brands probably then be ending up spending 10 to 50k a month, maybe even more, but they can't scale beyond that because of those natural limitations. But that's good, solid basis, right? Because usually that means you have, like, optimized feeds. That usually means you're have a ton of conversion data in the ad account. So without that, you that's, I wouldn't put the cart before the horse, if that makes sense, then you usually need kind of some sort of good average order value. So we've launched it with many brands at key periods, you know, like mothers or Father's Day, where they do well, where the average order value is not that great, but good enough, because the conversion rate compensates for it during sale periods, but in offline season, if you like, it's extremely hard to make it work, because you need a good average order value, because, after all, YouTube ads still has a lot more conversion friction than meta ADS has. They have done that a lot better than, than than the Google giant, and you need to compensate for that with good margins and average order value. So without that, you're pretty much screwed, right? And the fourth thing that I would say is more or less needed, would be that you need third party attribution, right? So you definitely need some sort of third party attribution software, such as triple whales, such as hiros were at metrics, I don't really care, traceify whatever they're called, but they are extremely good at measuring the impact of sort of the demand generation channels, much better than Google's own measurement platform is. And also you need some sort of post purchase survey implementation, because that's a really, really good guiding point to see the overall impact of yards, right? If you spend 5k and then in your post purchase survey, 10% of people say, Hey, I know this brand from YouTube, and you made $500,000 last month. Well, $50,000 is then your
turnover on YouTube. That's a 10x in ad spend, right? Boom, very easily determinable. So that's what that's the four things that you need. Without that, you can't get started. But with this brand, we had it. We have triple whale. We had a lot of existing creative we have an implementation in the post purchase survey through a platform called no commerce. And we had, obviously the willingness of testing a lot. So we went ahead and built four campaigns at the beginning. So we had a lot of sort of shorts format videos. So we went and built a prospecting shorts campaign only so shorts only. So. We built a remarketing shorts only campaign and a prospecting image campaign and a remarked in image campaign. The settings in there pretty straightforward. We actually implement the feed, right so we take in the feed because we have, of course, product focused ads. So we want to show our feed and our product with, with the ads. And in the shorts campaign, we on the on, everywhere, everything, we exclude TVs, of course, on campaign level as well. But then on the ad group level, the settings get quite interesting. So on the ad group level, first of all, in the shorts campaign, we only target shorts. Why is that? Because the shorts format videos should only be playing out on that channel, not on in stream, not on in feed, not I don't care, only on shorts, because the vertical formats is built for that way of consuming ads. So you should be only running ads on that and that's why we separate the campaigns, because they perform widely different in terms of volume, and we found that Google sometimes puts a lot of budget then into shorts, which, sorry, into images which may not work as well, but they cover a lot more placements if you mix and match the creatives within an ad account. So it's much better to keep it separate and to just launch an own shorts and own image campaign on the image campaign we've actually selected in feed, because that is what the images are that you sometimes see when you scroll on the main YouTube homepage, what formerly was some sort of discovery carousel ads, for instance, we also see that in Google. Well, they also going to be played out in Google discover and in jeep, in Gmail. I would, however, definitely not include display here on images, right? So that's usually something we exclude. Then to launch the campaigns, we usually have two ad groups with the same audience, but with one optimized targeting enabled, and the audience that we almost always use is a seed audience of all purchases, and then we use a look alike audience of two and a half or 5% to launch our first batch of ads. Now something to be said about the prospecting is that you always will want to exclude existing customers right from your from your targeting, and you'll also want to exclude warm retargeting audiences. So our prospecting campaigns are really even with optimized targeting, really prospecting campaigns and go to and look for new people, and our remarketing campaigns should target exactly those people, excluding purchases. So add to carts, begin checkouts, people who've been on the page, all that sort of stuff, maybe even people who've viewed your other YouTube videos, and remarket them if they've watched a YouTube video to a certain extent, like the YouTube video like to subscribe to your channel. I don't know. We call this level one, the video viewers. And level two are people who have really made it to the site. So this sounds very much like a classic 2018 retargeting and prospecting setup as you would have had on meta ads, which is basically dead now, but it still works really well for us, and that's why we keep using that with demand gen. Then in terms of creative, like I said in the shorts campaigns, only shorts, we only use one video per ad. We don't add three or five different videos to the ad. The reason is because we want to really see which creative is actually generating. What we use, of course, good copy to go with it. We usually mimic what has already been done on meta ads, right in terms of copy, in terms of landing page, and then we launch that. And it's the same with the image ads. Sometimes we even have advertorials or offer pages. We sometimes mix and match those to sort of rebuild what's worked really well on meta. Then we launch it, usually with a good test and budget. I always recommend 5x of your target CPA is a good daily budget. Google recommends, I think, up to 10 or 20 even, which is totally insane. Most brands can't afford that, but I think that's a pretty healthy start to go with. And then to optimize. It's relatively straightforward. So usually what we do is, when we have any creative that has much too high CPCs. Off the bat, we kill those instantly. Reason this is relatively straightforward. They're never going to scale, right? If you have CPCs of over $2 or $3 that is never scalable, right? You need to conversion rate of 80% something like that, to make that work. So off the bat, that's dead. I know exaggerated just now, but you know what I mean. Then we usually give creatives a certain benchmark spend in order to decide until we're when we pause them and we monitor those daily with the agreed attribution setting through which the meta ads media buyer judges the success of his campaigns as well. Finn. In this case, it was first click attribution on Triple whale. We use the exact same benchmark to scale down or to scale up campaigns and creatives, depending on whether they are successful and are generating sales or not. So for instance, if a product or, sorry, a campaign then spent over a creative has spent over 100 euros in itself, or dollars a pound as a benchmark, right, arbitrary benchmark, and it still hasn't done we then shut it off again. If a creative does well and has actually sold, that's where things get interesting. So with images, we usually duplicate this or ask for iterations on the image, but with the duplication, we then test copy, we then test a different landing page, and just chuck it into the same campaign and let it collect more spend again to see if we can sort of unlock a secret formula there with shorts, we do the same, we duplicate, we see if we can make iterations on copy and on the landing page or the offer page and see if we can see anything there. But if we really have a winning creative that is where things get really juicy. So we usually then ask either internally our colleague, we haven't really launched the service. So it's quite a better to be honest, but it's really easy to do with Canva, even to make sort of split screen creative so in stream. So imagine you've got your 16 to nine format, and you've got your winning short on the left, and then on the right you may use like a one to one creative of the best performing creative. You can easily pop these together and boom, you've got a video in 16 to nine format, which you can launch on in stream with the same setup, again, a prospect and remarketing, and then just let it run on in stream only. And this is what we do to repurpose creative usually, we then ask the meta ads team or the meta ads media buyer or their creative team to give us a folder on a weekly basis to upload new creative when there's new winners or new good, promising batches of products. Sorry, keep saying products, batches of creative. And that seems to work really well. What we then do on a weekly basis too, to verify are we on the right track is to analyze post purchase survey data. So the reality is, post purchase survey data is not 100% reliable, but it gives you a really good benchmark on how successful the ads really are. What we usually recommend is to have quite a granular post purchase Survey Setup, so not just have Google and YouTube as two options. I know these from Google, but to ask, do you know us from Google organic, Google Shopping? Do you know us from YouTube, organic, YouTube, generally, ads, YouTube shorts, YouTube, maybe that's less than too much, so YouTube ads and YouTube shorts could be two. Then Google discover Google News as one, Gmail as one. Of Google Mail is another one. And what we usually then ask for as well is,
I forgot the last one, but basically go granular, because then with that granular setup, like YouTube short setup or the image setup right on in feed, on Google discover and on Gmail, you can then see what your return on ad spend is there. And then you can also do the same for normal YouTube ads for in stream. So let's say, for instance, you you can cut this even all together, and then just see, hey, I've spent 10k on demand gen, and I've made a million last month overall in the entire account and ice. And I see 5% of people are saying, Oh, I know this brand from either YouTube discover, from Gmail or YouTube shorts. Well, boom, you know exactly, hey, I've got a five extra turn on ad spend, because 5% of my total turnovers come from YouTube ads, which is 50k and you spend 10k so that's how we on a weekly basis and verify if we're on the right track. Can we spend more? Can we spend less? And we try and mix and match this, of course, with the creatives. Some of the best accounts that we have on this. So we've got one account that almost trades exclusively now on on demand gen, so we spend depends they have different like, sort of sometimes events or other stuff that support and launches which support the activity we spend 50k plus, sometimes even 100k plus a month on demand, Gen ads. Sometimes we have one client who spends about 10k they sell shoes. The current client I just told you about which we've done this approach on they're on the on target to spend $10,000 This month. So it's all of various degrees, right? So it depends a little bit on what you sell on, what your niche is, and what, of course, you can do with your creative and that has been pretty much it, little case study, little sort of explanation of how we go along. If you wanted to ask me any question about that again. Sign up to the webinar this Thursday at 2pm UK time. I should have said it's UK time, which may be 3pm on the continent. In the US, it'll be something like 6am 7am in the morning. So yeah, six to 9am in the morning. God knows what time that would be in Australia? It might be midnight already, so don't worry about it. Maybe there'll be a recording. I'll find this out. Other than that, you can always ask me, of course, questions at Jeremy, at young individual dot marketing, or message me at Jeremy young, Google ads on LinkedIn. You can also head to the website and book a call with me to see if we can start launching demand gen ads for you as well. It would be lovely to expand your efforts on this wonderful push channel. Just another note, we're still looking for a senior Google Ads media buyer. Head to the website to see what the you have to be living in the UK, please. So no no applications from outside the UK, please, and head to the website if you match the profile. And I'd love to hear from you. This has been Jeremy young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead. You.