Google Ads: CTC's Complete Playbook

[00:00:00] Speaker: And just like on Meta, we split every campaign by customer type, so acquisition and re- and retention. This is a foundation for understanding incrementality, educating-- allocating budget correctly, and reporting honestly about the actual channel performance.

[00:00:16] Acquisition retention matters potentially even more on Google than it does on Meta.

[00:00:22] Okay. Hello everyone. Tony Chop here again with you, VP of Paid Media at Common Thread Collective, and today we're gonna be talking about CTC's canon specific to Google Ads. Google Ads, the king of demand capture. Unlike Meta, which creates demand by interrupting users with creative that generates interest in products they were not actively seeking, Google captures demand that already exists.

[00:00:48] Something has to prompt a user an in- an intent a need, a desire, a problem before Google can deliver your ad. Search is post-query. It exists after some sort of impetus. If Meta is the demand creation engine, Google is the demand harvesting engine. But the breakthrough opportunity is to treat Google more like Facebook and shift from pure demand capture on obvious terms to demand interception across a full spectrum of user intent.

[00:01:21] So the starting point of CTC's canon as it relates to Google Ads is a four-quadrant framework that we use to think about every search term that e- that exists. The, the search terms exist across two dimensions, competition and volume. In the upper end of this, of the quadrant, we have high volume, high competition keywords, things like shoes, pants, makeup.

[00:01:46] These are commodity keywords and can be difficult to access. On the flip side of the coin, in the lower end of the quadrant, we have low volume, low competition keywords. Something like something that's like a new entrant, a new keyword into the, into the space. Every search query exists somewhere in this spectrum, and the goal of your Google Ads program should be to expand the search frontier, moving beyond simple product queries into problem and use case queries.

[00:02:18] For example, a silicone wedding band brand should not only bid on silicone rings, but also on ring avulsion injuries, metal allergies, lost wedding ring replacement, honeymoon planning, manufacturing safety gear.

[00:02:36] Each query represents a person with a problem that that product specifically solves. A critical requirement is the having dedicated landing pages for each query type. Driving non-product queries to a product detail page creates a disconnect between intent and experience. It's very important with search to match the landing page to the query.

[00:02:57] I wanna talk a little bit about how Google specifically optimizes. Google's advertising system operates fundamentally differently than Meta. Where Meta evaluates creative to find users, Google evaluates queries to match intent. And the co-- that the core mechanism is the auction. For every search query, Google runs a real-time auction among eligible advertisers, scoring each on a combination of bid, ad relevance, expected click-through rate, and landing page experience.

[00:03:26] The trifecta of smart bidding plus broad match keyword and responsive search ads is where our modern Google Ads approach is, has evolved to. Broad match keywords expand the coverage beyond exact and phrase match, letting Google, Google's machine learning find converting queries you would never have discovered manually.

[00:03:48] For example manufacturing safety gear for a silicone wedding band ring. Responsive search ads are one product in a series of products that Google has continued to evolve providing multiple headlines and descriptions and dynamically assembled based on the best combination for each auction.

[00:04:07] And automated bidding like target ROAS or CPA lets the system bid based on real-time conversion probability, not fixed manual bids. Another important concept for CTC's Google philosophy is, incrementality-adjusted bidding. This is exactly what we do in our meta methodology and what we do for all of our media channels. We do not set ROAS targets or targets based on platform-reported performance. Instead, we set them based on incrementality-adjusted targets designed to ensure the channel is d-driving incremental profitable contribution margin for the business.

[00:04:48] There's, there's some really straightforward logic here. For example, if Google brand search has a incrementality factor of zero point three then a platform reported a ten-to-one ROAS actually represents a three-to-one in incremental return. And your bid targets must reflect this reality, not the inflated platform number.

[00:05:09] Setting a TROAS based on raw platform data means you're optimizing against fiction. Setting against incrementality-adjusted figure means you're optimizing against the actual economic impact of the spend. And this approach does two things for us.

[00:05:22] Fundamentally, it forces profitability at the true incremental level, and it gives Google the, the opportunity to scale into or the flexibility to scale into the opportunity. So therefore, when we feel really confident about our bid on brand search, we feel really confident about the incrementality adjusted bid, we're gonna scale in and capture as much of that brand search volume as possible.

[00:05:46] Okay, I wanna talk a little bit about this CTC six campaign structure for Google Ads. And just like on Meta, we split every campaign by customer type, so acquisition and re- and retention. This is a foundation for understanding incrementality, educating-- allocating budget correctly, and reporting honestly about the actual channel performance.

[00:06:07] Acquisition retention matters potentially even more on Google than it does on Meta. Historically, many of us have used-- have thought of the concept of brand and non-brand on, on Google Ads, and we've used these brand and non-brand phrases as, mm, shorthand or potentially proxies for new and existing customers, saying that brand campaigns are existing customers while non-brand campaigns are new customers.

[00:06:38] Over the last two years or so, Google has given us more and more reporting on new versus existing customer. And what we've come to learn is that just because you're advertising for brand keywords does not mean you are only acquiring e-existing customers. And just because you're advertising for non-brand keywords does not mean you're only acquiring new, new customers.

[00:06:58] So more work needs to be done in the Google Ads account to separate the campaigns by customer type. The six campaigns, the six core campaigns that are part of CTC's canon for Google Ads are this. A brand search acquisition campaign. The intention is to target new customers searching for your brand and use exclusions, either audience exclusions using a pixel or a customer list, or NCA, new customer acquisition bidding, to focus on new customer.

[00:07:31] The pair, a brand search retention. This is the inverse. This is targeting people that are searching for your brand that are already in your customer file. The second pair, non-brand search acquisition, non-brand search retention, and the third pair, performance max and/or shopping campaign acquisition retention.

[00:07:49] This is the six campaign setup. Brand, search, shopping, all split into pairs, acquisition and retention. A core concept in the Google Ads ecosystem is the idea of protecting the search results page specific for your brand queries. Brand search requires a dedicated strategic framework because it sits at the intersection of competitive defense, channel economics, and incrementality measurement. The competitive landscape on brand ser- search results page is contested territory, and there's three types of competitors that will bid on your brand.

[00:08:28] There's direct competitors selling similar products bidding on your name. There's retail partners and resellers who you have a distribution partnership with, and then there's Amazon. All three of these will affect the competitive pressure that exists in the brand space, and it is a dynamic environment.

[00:08:47] The strategic question is not should we run brand search, but what is the cost of not running brand search in this competitive environment? There's basically two ways to think about this. One, one pathway, when to bid aggressively. When the environment is competitive, when there are competitors or Amazon are actively bidding on your brand terms, when resellers are appearing above your organic listing, you need to protect the customer relationship and own the data.

[00:09:18] The inverse, when to pull back in a non-competitive environment when there's no competitors bidding on your brand search terms and your organic listing dominates the search results page. The incremental value of a paid click is next to zero. A customer would almost certainly have clicked on your organic listing anyway I wanna talk briefly about the infrastructure layer on Google Ads.

[00:09:39] A-as is true for all media platforms, clean, well-optimized data, data feeds approvals in Google Merchant Center in this case are the secret to shopping and Performance Max success. It's not glamorous work, but it is the foundation. Product feed optimization continues to be an important part of what it means to be successful in Google Shopping.

[00:10:04] All product att-attributes must be complete and accurate. Product titles should be optimized for search relevance. Images must meet Google specifications, and feeds should be updated at minimum daily. Google Merchant Center is where the product disapprovals are visible. 10% disapproval rate means 10% of your catalog is invisible.

[00:10:28] Using supplemental feeds for promotions and custom labels and, and seasonal overrides and product rating data matching between your review aggregator and Google Merchant Center is another important component. Lastly, I wanna talk about incrementality in search and why incrementality matters more on Google.

[00:10:47] Google's default attribution last click is the most generous attribution model in digital advertising for demand capture channels. A customer who's going to buy your product anyway, search for your brand, clicked on your ad and purchased Google Claims full credit. Without incrementality testing, it's impossible to know how much of that revenue is truly incremental versus revenue that you would've realized regardless.

[00:11:07] This is especially true for brand search, which is high attribution and often low incrementality shopping and performance max on brand queries and remarketing campaigns. We have benchmarks for Google's incrementality and we apply these as a starting point for each of our brands prior to running brand-specific incrementality tests.

[00:11:29] For Google non-brand, our benchmark medium is 0.6. For Google brand, our benchmark medium is median is 0.27. Those are our benchmark mediums

[00:11:39] The best part about this is the measurement integration into Statlas. Google performance flows directly into Statlas alongside all the other channels. iROS reporting is normalized against Meta, allowing apples-to-apples comparison of incremental return across the media mix, and this is essential for budget allocation decisions at the portfolio level.

[00:12:00] The Google channel is an extremely important part of an e-commerce portfolio. There are some unique nuances because the f- of the fact that it is an intent-driven channel. But with good incrementality measurement that help, that leads to sharp target setting paired with really solid campaign architecture that focuses that makes it, that makes it clear whether we are attempting to acquire a new customer or whether we're talking to an existing customer, you can be very successful with driving e-commerce, profitable e-commerce growth through Google.