Matching a potential customer’s search intent with your products can be one of the most lucrative ways to grow your brand. That’s what Google Ads excel at.
Where Meta ads create demand — encouraging behaviour change, building brand awareness, and measurably growing brands even before customers spend money — Google Ads are the other side of the equation: they’re the ad format that turns people looking for your category generally into your customers specifically.
Here’s what you should know about Google Ads.
Google Ads are driven by search.
Even with the advent of Performance Max, the vast majority of Google Ads impressions are driven by relevant searches. Google can’t serve you a Search or Shopping ad for something you haven’t searched for. Display is different, of course, but we have tools to isolate your Display spend in PMax. YouTube has a different function altogether but in a general PMax campaign YouTube is a simple retargeting tool rather than a high commitment brand building investment — which is what it’s best at.
They’re also capped by search volume.
Because Google can only serve ads for terms that people look for, your Search and Shopping campaigns can eventually hit caps depending on your niche. For a lot of brands, there’s a lot of product-market fit and there are large markets for their range of products.
For most businesses, there’s plenty of room. For others, especially with a niche focus, you might find that supplementary products are eating all of your Google spend.
Your Performance Max will be heavily retargeting by default.
That’s why you need to remove Brand from your Performance Max campaigns as a first port of call. Yes, this will make your performance look worse. Yes, it will also make your performance more accurate. That’s why I use a script that breaks down how much Display your account is doing.
Display placements are the number one way that Google retargets. That’s because it’s limited by search volume, as a reminder, so if your previous/existing customers aren’t searching for your brand, it can’t serve them ads.
Your Google Ads agency might be ripping you off.
Might be. I say this because Google Ads don’t need as much constant injection of creative as Meta ads. Think about it: how often does your core business change? How often do your products change? Even if you’re dropping a lot of new inventory frequently, your Google & YouTube Shopify plugin will connect that inventory to your Merchant Center then to your Google Ads.
That’s not proof they’re ripping you off.
But they’re ripping you off if they charge you more than your ad spend.
They’re ripping you off if they’re getting a 7x or a 8x ROAS in-platform and they haven’t tried to scale your budget.
Think about it: would you rather an 8x ROAS at $1,000 a month or a 5x ROAS at $10,000 a month? Or even a 5x ROAS at $1,000 a day?
You might be limiting your Google Ads people.
Whether you’ve got a Google Ads agency or a Google Ads freelancer like me, you might also be limiting them by restricting how much access they have to data. I understand: revenue is sensitive. But I promise you they don’t need to know the P&L. They just need to be able to see Shopify. To be able to monitor daily, ideally, whether increasing your Google Ads daily spend is making incremental differences to your revenue.
Of course, every day won’t be perfect.
Your Performance Max might overspend today but deliver results in a week when new customers from your Shopping or Search ads that were looking for your category but not you specifically, or for a competitor, sign up to your Welcome Flow and from that eventually purchase.
It’s an ecosystem.
If you have a search-friendly category, the sky can be the limit.
Of course there are operational realities. You can’t spend $100,000 a month if you’re not making much more than that. But remember that your ad spend is often the force multiplier. That is: more ad spend generally means more money.
And you have control over your ad budget. It’s easy to adjust. Easy to incrementally increase as a stress test. Because:
You might be spending too little.
Just this week I’ve talked to two brands doing significant revenue across their retail stores. One was doing over $10,000 a week from one storefront here in Brisbane. Another has 24 stories across Victoria.
The brand with $10,000 per week had some Google Ads running from a super-switched on digital creative. But they were only spending $8 a day on Google Ads. To a store that was just about ready to include syntactic metafields.
Imagine paying $8 a day to a salesperson in your store. What kind of results would you expect? This brand too was prepared to invest a salary in an ecommerce operator. I told them: spend that money online instead. They saw immediate results doubling their ads budget to $16 a day.
And for the brand with 24 retail stores across Victoria, they were only spending $100 a day on their Google Ads. And they weren’t seeing a lot of results! Again: imagine paying only $100 a day to a salesperson in one of those stories.
That’s how Google Ads work: an always-on, persistent online salesperson driving people into your store (your website) and making sales that your team on the ground simply couldn’t.
And it’s all worth it because:
I’ve seen remarkable results.
Results like doubling revenue from $300,000 a month to $600,000 a month… in a month. That’s not an exaggeration.
If that’s what you want from your Google Ads, get in touch.