Today in Digital Marketing - Inside Google Ads — Sample Episode

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, February 21st, and my wife and I are actually out of the country right now until next Thursday, but I will not leave you hanging. Today, I'm sharing an episode of Inside Google Ads. That is the new podcast from our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskengales. If you like what you hear, be sure to sign up for her podcast. Again, it's called Inside Google Ads, wherever you get your podcasts. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover

Starting point is 00:00:30 from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen.

Starting point is 00:00:51 How specific can you really get with Google Ads targeting? Let's go inside Google Ads to answer your burning questions about ad targeting. I'm your host, Jill Saskin-Gales, bringing you more than a decade of Google Ads expertise. I worked at Google for six years, and now I'm your host, Jill Saskin-Gales, bringing you more than a decade of Google Ads expertise. I worked at Google for six years, and now I'm a marketing coach, consultant, teacher, content creator, speaker, author, and podcast host. I've worked with more than 10,000 Google Ads accounts, showing business owners and marketers how to make more money from paid ads. And now I'm here to do the same for you every week for free.

Starting point is 00:01:26 Each week, I pick three of your burning questions to answer in detail from the hundreds of comments I receive on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads. You can find all those links in the show description. And if you want a chance to get your problem solved in a future episode, drop a comment on any of my social media posts.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Remember, my Inside Google Ads course members get to do this with me live every month on an exclusive one-hour call. And now to our first Google Ads question about targeting. Jean-Claude actually sent me a DM on TikTok, and he asked, I'm a big fan of your interesting channel. Really always great videos. Thank you, Jean-Claude, or should I say merci? I'm a big fan of your interesting channel. Really always great videos. Thank you, Jean-Claude. Or should I say, merci. I have a question for the expert. How exactly do you advertise to a target group that has visited specific websites?

Starting point is 00:02:15 So in Google Ads, how do you show ads to people who have been to specific websites? Here's your answer, Jean-Claude, and everyone else who wants to know. In Google Ads, you can create something called a custom segment, and you can show ads to a custom segment from a display campaign, a demand gen campaign, or a video campaign. You can also use this custom segment as part of your audience signal for a performance max campaign. So here's what you're going to want to do. In Google Ads, go to Tools, Shared Library, Audience Manager, and then Custom Segments. Within Custom Segments, there's a few different things you can do. You want to scroll down a little to the part that's about Visited Websites. And there you can type in the websites people have visited who you want to show ads to. Now, one important

Starting point is 00:03:06 thing to keep in mind here is Google Ads is not promising to show ads exactly to people who visit those exact websites. What it will do is show ads to people who have visited websites like those websites. The language it uses is websites similar to, okay? So if you just put one website in there, like let's say your competitor is, I don't know, joesbusiness.com and you want to do competitor targeting. So you say, I want to show ads to people who have visited websites similar to joesbusiness.com. I don't recommend doing just one website in there because Google is going to be like, well, what is it about joesbusiness.com? Why are these the kind of people you're looking to target? Okay, we'll find websites similar to that. There's

Starting point is 00:03:48 probably a ton of websites that are similar to that. So if you're using this for competitor targeting, that's one way people like to use it, or to create really niche audiences around kind of affinity-based websites, it's not a great way to use it. I recommend you put at least five websites in there. So for example, let's say that you're trying to reach, I don't know, small business owners. Many ways to do that with Google ads. But one way is people who have visited websites similar to Shopify.com, Wix.com, Squarespace.com, etc. Why is that? Because the people who visit websites that help you manage your website are people who own businesses, right? And if they're logging into Shopify, they're not going to be some large business doing that. It's going to be a smaller

Starting point is 00:04:34 business. So that's one example of how you could do this. Another example, I once had a coaching client whose target audience was dental hygienists. Dental hygienists, that's very specific, right? There's no way with existing Google audiences to reach dental hygienists. And so one thing we decided to do there was to create a custom segment based on visiting certain websites that dental hygienists would visit. So there's certain associations they belong to, training programs they would take, forums they would chat in professional accreditation. So those are the websites we put in there to create our own custom segment targeting that niche audience of dental hygienists. So thank

Starting point is 00:05:18 you, Jean-Claude, for your question. You can get very specific with your targeting in Google Ads. You just need to get creative with those custom segments. Now, before we get to our second Google Ads targeting question, a quick reminder that you can receive the transcript of this episode in your inbox each week. So if you're more of a visual than an auditory person, I know I'm definitely more visual than auditory, you can sign up for the Inside Google Ads newsletter on my website. The link for that is in the description with this episode, so you can receive this whole thing in writing to refer back to later. All right, it's time for our second

Starting point is 00:05:54 Google Ads targeting question, which interestingly is the inverse of our first. So Hicham on TikTok asks, how do you advertise display ads on a specific website that uses Google AdSense? So here's why this is the inverse. Jean-Claude wanted to show ads to people who have been to certain websites. Hicham wants to show ads to people who are currently on certain websites. And so we do not do that with custom segments. That works in a completely different way. We want to use placements. And you can choose specific website placements for display campaigns

Starting point is 00:06:31 and for non-conversion-based video campaigns. So display campaigns and video campaigns. You can choose specific websites you want your ads to run on and specific apps as well. The way you do this is in the settings for your campaign. You go to audiences first, confusingly, gotta love that new Google ads interface, keywords and content, content placements. And from there, there are three kinds of placements you can choose. Websites, so you want to show your ads on specific websites. Apps, you want to show your ads in specific websites. Apps, you want to show your ads in specific apps. And then YouTube channels, of course, for video, you want to show ads on specific channels. Now, placements is not very scalable, and it can also get quite expensive if these are

Starting point is 00:07:18 really in-demand placements. So I recommend if you do want to do content targeting, that topics can be a much easier way to scale. And then display video keywords can actually be a better way, in my opinion, to get really specific. Display video keywords is where you choose certain keywords that you want to show ads against. Not from a search perspective, meaning that keyword is in the text on that page. So if someone is reading an article that mentions dental hygienist, right, you want to show an ad on that. So these are your different kinds of content targeting you can do. Placements, topics, display video keywords. And this top, this question was about placements specifically. So your placement options are websites, apps, and YouTube channels. I personally don't use placements in my ad strategies, but I get versions of this question a lot. So that's how you do it.

Starting point is 00:08:13 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Now we've been focusing on display and video campaign targeting here, but of course that's not the only place you can get really specific with your Google Ads targeting. So let's flip over to a search targeting question for our third question today. An anonymous user on TikTok asks, you've suggested using audiences in targeting mode for search campaigns in one post. That's true. But in this post, you've suggested adding

Starting point is 00:09:02 audiences on observation mode. Also true. I'm a little bit confused right now. First of all, I'd like to thank anonymous user on TikTok for phrasing this in a really friendly, non-confrontational way. That doesn't happen so much. They're basically saying in one post, you said use audiences on targeting and search campaigns. In another post, you said add audiences and observation mode in a search campaign. What is it, Jill? Pick one. So love that you're paying close attention. Let's explain. With a search campaign and a standard shopping campaign, you can choose to add audiences on observation mode or on targeting mode. Observation mode means I want to be eligible to show my ads to anyone

Starting point is 00:09:42 searching for my keywords. And if they're also on one of these audience lists, make a note of it. Observe that for me so I can review that data later. So observation mode doesn't affect the performance or placement of your ads at all. It just collects data. Targeting mode means I want to show ads to people who are searching for my keywords and match one of these audiences. So if who are searching for my keywords and match one of these audiences. So if someone is searching for my keywords, but they don't match one of these audiences I've chosen, I don't want to show an ad to them. That's targeting mode. So targeting mode limits the reach

Starting point is 00:10:16 of your search campaigns because someone has to not only be searching for one of your keywords, they have to also match one of those audience lists you've selected. Generally, if you want to test layering audiences over search, I recommend observation as a starting point. As I said, it doesn't affect performance. It doesn't affect the placement or the writing of your ads. You're just collecting data. And data is always a good thing for decision making. And then once you've observed how certain audiences perform, you may see, hey, people who recently started a business tend to convert more than people who are recently left their job. I'm just making this up. Right. So that can help you then decide, OK, I want to either limit the reach of my campaign by adding audiences on targeting just to certain audiences. Or another really creative way to use targeting mode in search campaigns is to say, look, there are some keywords that

Starting point is 00:11:09 I can't advertise on. They're just too broad. I get too much irrelevant traffic. But if someone's searching for those keywords and they match one of my audiences, okay, then I want to advertise to them. This is very commonly used in a B2B context. And I actually did something like this with an e-commerce client. This is very commonly used in a B2B context. And I actually did something like this with an e-commerce client. This is back when I actually managed Google ads for people, which I don't do anymore. But they had tried running shopping campaigns, having their products show up in Google search results, but it didn't work well for them because they were a secondhand clothing store. So someone is searching for, you know, a Gap dress or Old Navy, whatever.

Starting point is 00:11:44 Chances are they're not looking for something secondhand. So shopping ads never worked well for this client. But what we did, what I did for them, is launched a shopping campaign. But then I added a remarketing list of their website visitors on targeting mode. And so in much simpler English, what that means is I told Google, I do want to show shopping ads, but only to people who have visited my website before. If they have never visited my website before, I do not want to show them a shopping ad. And so what that meant is when people who had been to this business's website before,

Starting point is 00:12:15 and therefore they were interested in secondhand clothing, when familiar with this business and how they sold secondhand clothing, if they searched for, you know, Gap Dress or maybe T-shirt, whatever it might be, they could then see those shopping ads. And that worked well. We were able to achieve a higher ROAS with this campaign than with any other kind of plain search campaign we were running, which not surprising. It's remarketing. So can you get super specific with your Google Ads targeting? Absolutely. Custom audience segments, content targeting like topics, placements, and keywords, and audience layers on search campaigns are just some of the ways to ensure you're reaching your target customers effectively. If you want a step by step tutorial visually about how to execute everything we spoke about today, you should look

Starting point is 00:13:02 into my membership course inside Google Ads. Yes, it has the same name as this podcast. That's where I show you everything Google won't tell you about managing your ads effectively and efficiently. Inside Google Ads has more than 100 in-platform Google Ads tutorials. It's frequently updated, and you get direct access to me in a one-hour membership call each month. Inside Google Ads is the best way to get my Google Ads training at an affordable price. You can learn more about Inside Google Ads, the membership course, at learn.jill.ca, that's j-y-l-l dot c-a, or click the link in the description below this episode of Inside Google Ads, the podcast. I'm Jill Saskin-Gales, and I'll see you next week, Inside Google Ads.

Today in Digital Marketing - Inside Google Ads — Sample Episode

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