How to Use Advertorials to Reach Cold Audiences on Google Ads

When your Google Ads stop scaling, it's usually because you've run out of product-aware traffic, and advertorials are how you fix that. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy delivers a practical mini playbook on how to use advertorials to bridge the gap between problem-aware cold audiences and your product page, covering everything from domain setup and funnel tools to cross-domain tracking and bid strategy progression. 

Learn why a separate domain and ad account are non-negotiable, how to structure a comparison advertorial that supplements your bottom-funnel campaigns first, and how to expand into high-volume problem searches once the model is proven. 

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

Every bigger e-commerce brand runs into this issue at some point. You start with brand search always converts, right? Brilliant. Done plenty of episodes, by the way, on brand search. Have a look back at them. But they're the foundation of your ad account in which you build your non-branded shopping. Maybe a nice uh shopping brand and nonbrand split p a few pax campaigns. So, which potentially you're even running demand genen. That's amazing. But at some point you are running into a wall because especially already in the area where you go into a search, you push into cold audiences, your ass tanks and you are buying cheap traffic that unfortunately doesn't con convert. How to solve this? I want to tell you in this episode. Welcome back. to Google Ads Unleash. Guys, hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. I've done plenty of episodes on advertorials, but the topic has come up with a few clients again in the last few weeks, and it's something that we've been asked over and over over again, which is why I want to give you the mini playbook today on how you can start with advertorials yourself. Why advertorials? Well, you've run your ad account to a certain degree already. You've got your brand search, or maybe not, depending on on whether it's viable or not. Plenty of episodes on that. Go and uh back and listen to them. You've got your shopping campaigns, you got your uh maybe search campaigns and a few bottomfunnel uh uh keywords, but then suddenly you are trying to um scale into some keyword pools which have a lot a lot a lot of search volume, usually problem searches um and they simply don't convert. Well, why is that? Because of the following. When you have a funnel, your in the traditional sense, there are several stages starting from your brand. So, the least amount of search volume that exists are people who are aware of your brand. Um, in fact, the least amount of volume that exists are people who are existing customers, right? So, that's sort of the starting point of this inverse pyramid. Then there's search volume of your brand that is usually very limited and there's not really many people looking for it. This branded volume is generated by all of the sort of push marketing that you do potentially sometimes even from existing customers um potentially from referrals that existing customers made etc etc. Right? This is not scalable. There's not really a lot of volume there. The the piece of the pie is very small there. You're already efficiently capturing that and the return on ad spend usually is quite high although the incrementality is very low. Oh, then you scale up with maybe shopping campaigns, bottomfunnel, search campaigns into people who are product aware. So there's people searching for your product. They want your product. They want to buy it. They click on shopping ads. They click on search ads and buy directly. That volume is limited as well. The volume that is very very high though are of people who are um uh then sort of only problem aware but not solution or product aware. Okay. So a classic example of this for instance would be uh let's say you um have a product that removes stains from uh your carpet pet like uh pea stains from pets. So you would probably search for something like uh pet uh uh pea stain remover or something like that. I'm sure there's plenty of sort of cleaning product products and stuff that do exactly that. Now, what do you think how much search volume there is, however, for how to get stains out the carpet or something like that or how to get uh dog poo stains out the carpet or something like that. Probably 5 to 10x of what I've just said. And the reason for that is is that more people who have the problem very often don't actually know the solution. Sometimes there are certain products even where people are only problem aware but they are not solution aware. For instance, I used to have a brand where we used to do only advertorials because they sold supplements for dogs uh that helped with the joints of dogs. But no one searches for joint supplement for dogs, right? People search for um my dog is limping, what do I do? And that is exactly where advertorials come in because a cold audience who doesn't know the solution and doesn't know your brand and is so far removed from being a customer customer. If we go up uh or down this funnel, they are not ready for a product page because a product page asks for a sale. It doesn't actually earn it. So, you need to bridge that gap with pieces of content and with pieces of copy that actually uh drive from sol from problem awareness over the piece of content to solution awareness. And that is where the advertorials come in. Um, and this is not theory because um, what we're thinking in the agency is advertorials are the single biggest lever that we're rolling out across many client accounts. Uh, we do this with multiple clients. We the same play, the same spiel and it's always our default next step before once the core account is healthy and we run this sort of scheme exactly bit by bit on all of our accounts and then we exp and into uh the adverttorial sort of area. And the first part what we do is well let's first of all maybe talk about what an advertorial actually is. So just to remind you I've done one or two episodes about this already but an advertorial is an long form editorial style landing page. It usually looks or reads like an article. Uh and what it usually does it sells your uh your solution and uh your product through a story. or a bit of education or social proof. Sometimes it can even be like a quiz funnel, right? So something like um let's say you do the pet stain remover thing again, right? The the stain remover. Um you could do a little quiz funnel. Is it your cat? Is it a dog? Is it a poo stain? Is it a pea stain? I don't know. Whatever. Do you have this carpet? Do you have this carpet? Boom. Here's the solution to your problem. Right? It could be even that. Uh and it's tells that solution through um social proof, through telling a story, and it works better for cold traffic because it does the persuasion that a product page simply can't do. It takes them from what is my problem to I actually want this now and I know this is the solution to my problem before they even hit the store, which does not happen with shopping ads. Okay? Because with shopping ads, you might look for iPhone 14 uh aluminum case and then you find exactly that and boom you buy because in your head you already made the decision to buy it and you know the solution. So now you're only looking at sort of USPS and other factors such as price such as um USPS such as branding such as delivery times etc. in order to pull the trigger. You're actually not making other sort of uh thoughts. You don't have other thoughts in your head such as um what is the is actually going to solve it. Uh am I sure this is the right solution etc etc. So advtorials are usually not like thin pages with a buy button and that's it. It tries to uh be a sales page in disguise and tries to be the uh a piece of credibility that gets people from article from story to committing to make a purchase. Okay. And how we usually set this up is first of all we buy a separate domain. Why? Because um if an advvertorial is on your own website it loses credibility. It's basically it just looks like you basically uh uh commit self adulation. How good am I that etc etc. Um and here's my product that solves your problem. Well whilst we want to do that to a certain degree if it's on the own URL usually this just does not work. We usually want like a third-party page or a separate URL because it shows that uh it because it gives the impression that it's sort of like an independent journal or something like that that writes about your your old problem. Okay. It also keeps your website and funnel clean and the funnel itself clean, measurable, and it allows a very easy brand and non-brand comparison later. We also want a separate Google Ads account because You don't want to contaminate the call accounts data. You want to keep it isolated and then scale later knowing the numbers are real. You usually want to have some sort of funnel tool. Now, I've had people already build certain landing pages like that with claude code and similar and just self-hosted, which is an amazing solution if you can do it because it keeps the loading speed really, really fast. We usually use funnelish though. We're not really affiliated with them, so there's loads of uh funnel tools. uh through which you can uh do this. But Funish is pretty straightforward for us. We use it all the time and it's just a small subscription every month. You can connect the domains really easily. It's us it's a pretty decent tool in order to do the job. Um and then you want to have that uh adverttorial uh hand off to the main store for checkout or to a sales page depends on what you want to do. So this is the setup you get. yourself a different domain. You get yourself a funnelish account and then you set up the tracking once you have your advertorial written. Usually the advvertorial that we go for to start with is what we call a comparison advertorial. So we compare our clients uh product solution with three or four other competitors on the market which is by the way legal if you do it right. Um I mean you see it all the time in the ads. Aldif for instance compares their price prices to leader um or sainsburree is always Aldi price matches etc. So it is allowed to a certain degree but you just have to be really transparent about the fact that this is a sponsored uh article and that it's not really an independent complete review. Right? So go back to the episode that I mentioned and the reason why I do that is because it supplements your bottomfunnel traffic first and then trains the algorithm quite nicely on that so that you can then start going into other sort of uh um problem searches. Something I'm going to go uh into in a second. But yeah, once you have that uh basically what you want um and where most people then go wrong is the tracking. So the problem because the problem that you usually have is someone clicks an ad, lands on the advertorial which is domain A, let's say, and then buys on the store which we call domain B. And if the tracking's wrong, that sale is invisible because the session is cut off the moment someone clicks away from domain A and land on domain B and Google Ads has no idea where that sale has come from and where to attribute it back. So what we usually do is install the same uh Google Tag Manager across domain A and B enable cross domain tracking between the two. Usually you can do this in the conversion linker. Uh you can very simply connect the domains. You can also connect the domains in the Google tag. Um set up a purchase conversion that can fire it back. into um the separate ad account that you've set up for the advtorial. Um and uh then that is usually what already does the trick, which is really really uh it's really easy to do when you know what you're doing, but there's a lot a lot of pitfalls if you have no idea and there's a lot of things where it can go wrong. Uh something that's non-negotiable is to make a test purchase before you uh actually do this. So make make a few test purchases, check that it's working. Um, and then you are good to launch it. Normally what we do is what I said already, we do the comparison advertorial because they are still product and solution searches which usually convert better. As a result, we see if this kind of uh style uh of of content actually really works for this brand. It usually does. We start usually on maximize clicks. Yes, it's this traffic strategy, but we to kickstart the ad account with that when we don't have any conversion data. Um, and it's a del liberate choice. We let that run for a while and we start with a modest budget to not overspend. Usually something like uh 2 to 3x of the target CPA um that we are trying to achieve. After about 30 conversions, we switch to max conversions and then after about 50 60 plus conversions, we switch to Toras or TCBA depending on what we do and already start iterating from there on the creative which is then usually an AB test figuring out where we are going wrong. We then also implement tracking to usually uh understand what the outbound click-through rate is of the advertorial which is typically the success rate uh indicator of an ad tutorial because it indicates how many people from the advertorial actually land on the sales page. You want to aim for at least 15% for that once you then do once you have enough traffic is to then start going into ideas for how you can expand into problem searches. What I mean by that is as follows. So we have for instance a client who sells a supplement for detoxification, right? So I'm not going to say exactly the word but basically people will search for this exact product and we are are at a finite volume with that. So we've built a comparison advtorial that compares with three four other detox ification products and that is now already converting and generating quite a few sales and that's really nice but the volume lies in now searches such as how do I detox from heavy metals or how do I uh feel more vital or something like that or um uh uh I you know etc etc. So basically that is what you the the volumes that we now want to go into. And now we're building pieces of advtorials that sort of go into that exact area in order to um yeah present the product as a solution and build it on top of that and that's already working as well. So that is then the easy way how we then scale up. So we've got existing search volume for all of the pain points that our products solves. We've got a plan that already in place that we're going to build and that tutorial almost every month. um yeah two or three every month um and then uh scale into that as well. And if you want to know how that works or if this is interesting then just get in touch. We actually offer it as a service. Um youngigital marketing is the website. Just book a call with me. Send me a message. Jeremy youngdigital.marketing um uh is the email address or you can just find me on LinkedIn Jeremy on Google Ads and I can very happily uh arrange a call with you there. Hopefully this has been helpful uh or given you a little guide on how you start with your first advertorial. Maybe even use AI to get like a bit of a plan in place with the episode that I've just made. And uh it'll help you also draft your first wireframes, which is really cool. Use a bit of cloud code. You should be using it anyway. And um that will help you go on the way. This has been Jeremy Young, your personal Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive weekend.