How to approach Google Search Ads?

Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day. That’s a huge number. Now out of these 8.5 billion, it is difficult to understand which search keywords should we target and which keywords will give us good results. Hence to get results in Google Search Ads we need a strong strategy and regular experimentation.

There are many blogs which talk about different match types for keywords and best practices for setting up a campaign. We will not discuss that. Here we will understand how to create a basic strategy for google ads, which will help us structure the campaigns & run quality experiments. Which will further help us understand what is working and what is not.

The first step is to understand what types of keywords are there and how we can bucket them based on the customer’s intent.

Examples: Buy shampoo online, Buy wow shampoo, purchase mamaearth shampoo, etc.

2. Research Intent: When customers are researching a particular product, they use searches which have words like “best”, “top 5”, “reviews”, etc.

Customers are usually in the research stage of the growth marketing framework and they have questions like – “What are other people saying about this product?”, “Which is the best brand for this product?”, “What is the price on different platforms?”, etc.

We can classify these keywords as “Warm”, as the customers are definitely interested in the product and they have moved down the Awareness and Consideration stage to the Research stage.

Examples: top 10 onion shampoos, mamaearth onion shampoo reviews, wow shampoo price, etc.

The second step is to segregate Brand Keywords, Competitor Keywords and Generic Keywords. Let us understand each one of these:

Examples: ABC Shampoo, buy ABC shampoo online, etc.

Examples: mamaeath shampoo online, wow onion shampoo, etc.

Examples: Shampoo, Onion Shampoo, etc.

Once we have clarity on the first 2 steps, we can create a matrix which will have 9 different keyword buckets. The table below depicts the same.

Once we have this ready, it is very obvious that we would want to start with the first bucket of keywords in the matrix. Branded keywords with Purchase Intent. This is because customer has the highest intent and they are very relevant to us as the customer is searching specifically for our brand. If you have search volume for these keywords, then do target this bucket of keywords.

But many small startups might not have brand keyword searches. So, in that case, our aim for any brand-building activity should be to increase keywords and their search volumes in this bucket of keywords.

The second bucket is the Purchase intent & competitor keywords, my suggestion would be to leave this bucket because of the following reasons:

1. It will increase the Customer Acquisition Cost: If the competition on certain keywords rises in an auction environment, then the cost per click will increase and hence the customer acquisition cost will also increase.
2. The relevancy of competitor websites will always be higher for these keywords and Google will position their ads at the top. Due to lower relevancy, Google will always charge you higher for these keywords even for a lower position.
3. The customer is already searching a purchase intent competitor keyword, so mostly they have made their choice and want to purchase the competitor brand.

Now let’s see the third bucket, here we have generic keywords which are specific to a category or product but don’t have any brand name. We can actually show ads for this. Keep the following points in mind for this bucket:

1. In this bucket, there will be keywords which will give us sales and a few keywords that might not. Be mindful and segregate them as you keep figuring it out.
2. Always segregate high and low search volume keywords here. Sometimes low search volume keywords have less competition and we can get results easily out of them.
3. Also, segregate keywords as per the products or features of the product so that we can write extremely relevant ad copies for the same.
4. For new brands which don’t have many branded keyword searches, this bucket is very important and we have to ensure that we get conversions out of these keywords.

Here is an example of how we can use generic keywords that have a purchase intent. Let us say that ABC brand makes shampoos that are very relevant for curly hair. So the generic keywords we should target for getting conversions will be – buy shampoo for curly hair, shampoo for curly hair online, etc. Hence, long-tail keywords that are specific to your products will be good to focus on.

Whereas keywords like, buy shampoo may have a high search volume but will not yield conversions.

The fourth bucket is Branded Research keywords, for these keywords we should actually ensure that we get the organic listing. Either by writing blogs or making our product pages more and more relevant.

But if we want to run ads for these keywords the objective should be to get more and more traffic and not necessarily sales. This bucket will also have a few keywords that might give conversions and we should definitely segregate them into separate ad groups to ensure more control.

For Competitor Research keywords, we should avoid spending money. Again because of the same reasons mentioned in the competitor branded keywords. The same goes for the “Competitor Other keywords” bucket, which is the 8^th bucket in our matrix.

Generic Research keywords are the sixth bucket, this bucket we should definitely target for SEO and plan to get the organic listing.

Now let’s see the seventh bucket, which is branded keywords but not purchase or research related. Most of the keywords in this bucket should actually be added in the negative keyword list as we don’t want to spend money showing ads for these keywords.

The last bucket is very generic and has extremely low intent. We should actually negate these keywords in the exact match so that we don’t spend money on these keywords. But if we want to create awareness then we should use these keywords just to get traffic to our website and get impressions. But we might not end up getting conversions from these keywords immediately.

You can also read the article on my website.