The strength of Google Ads lies in its ability to target internet users wherever they browse, but how do you use it? And can it fit your company’s specific goals?
Knowing what each campaign type can do, where their respective ads show, and how each one targets users is crucial to understanding the value of Google Ads. Once you understand the basics, you will be able to determine if one (more likely many) of the platform’s tools can help you.
While there are others like performance max, local, and discovery, the four covered in the video highlight the various placements and targetting tools that most campaign types will use one way or another.
Scroll on to read my summation rather than watch the video.
The reason each campaign performs differently lies in a few factors: what their ads look like, how they target users, cost, and intent.
Intent is basically what the searcher was intending at the moment they see your ad.
That’s an important bit to note when thinking about the theory of all this.
Let’s break it down by campaign and analyze the key factors. Towards the end, I will provide a chart that breaks it down visually.
In the video I started with Display, a trick to get people to listen further. But I’ll start with the one most people are interested in here. Search is what most people think of when they think of Google Ads. I mean, Google Search hosts more than 85% of all searches year over year, so when you talk about reach and potential, Search has it.
Search Ads are sneaky. They show in line with organic and virtually looks the same. Usually, it appears in the first four results and the last four (this can vary based on quality score and search intent).
Can you spot the difference between the ad and the organic result?
This, right here, is the reason that Search makes businesses the big bucks.
With Search, you target keywords. You sell red shoes? then you can target “red shoes” and hopefully start making sales. Easy? so far, yes.
Of course, there is selecting match types, do you want “red shoes” to pick up searches for “why red shoes make you look faster?” If no, then you probably want to use phrase match or exact match rather than broad. I’ll write more about that later.
Answers for this question and questions like this are always going to be vaguer than you’d like, but relative to the other campaign types I’m covering today, they are typically the most expensive clicks in the game.
Sounds bad right? Not really. Let me tell you why…
Search Ads are considered high intent advertising. Here’s why: the user is there, in the search bar and they just told you what they want. A good advertiser knows how to target specific keywords and the intent behind the search in order to deliver the right ad and beyond that, the right landing page experience.
Say I offer a project management system and I want to target users at the top of my funnel to feed my email list. What keyword would you target?
I would suggest targetting a problem like “organize my projects.”
The person entering that term knows they have a problem but don’t know enough to search for the solution. Then you take them to a page that tells them how you can address that pain and asks for a minimal commitment like an email.
How about low-funnel? Finding the low funnel traffic is where you can pump out positive ROI.
With the same example, I would target “Task management software for business.” This term tells me that the user is aware of what they want and they want it for a business ($$). You can probably take this user to a free trial or purchase page!
Back to costs, the clicks for Search can get ridiculously expensive because it’s auction-based. And targetting high-intent traffic means that you have high conversion rates, therefore you are willing to pay more per click when you know what works for you.
Intents deserve a whole textbook’s worth of content but hopefully, you get the basic principle.
I just went far too deep into Search but a lot of those theories can be applied to shopping. The main thing to note about shopping is that it is built for eCommerce. Here are the key differences
For most users, they experience shopping ads in search results. When Google deems a search to have eCommerce intent, it will place these ads at the top or in the right column.
For example, our search from the last section won’t turn up any Shopping results, however, a search for “canvas apron online” will.
You’ll also see Search Ads below the shopping results.
You can sometimes see Shopping Ads on the right side of the results as well.
And on top of the shopping results…
Shopping ads target keywords, however, you choose those keywords based on what words are in the heading and body of your listing. So they are technically managed from the merchant center or Shopify or wherever you host it.
Since you are not selecting the keywords to show for, you are letting Google choose which always means there is a little slower optimization period and it’s harder to control compared to Search.
The intent here is much like Search. The user searches for something, the business answers. Where it loses ground a bit is on the aforementioned lack of control over the keywords you target.
But it does win in one regard; the user gets to see the price, name, picture of the product, rating, and such, so your user already has a sense of your product. That makes each click a little more qualified.
Note: I didn’t forget costs, they are just very similar to Search Ads
Display and YouTube breach into a placement we haven’t discussed yet. Both of these Ads are great for things like retargeting and awareness goals. In the case of YouTube Ads, you get to showcase your product and spit out a lot of information in a little time. It’s not how I normally recommend kicking off your ads account but they are a very nice compliment in any mid-to-late maturity account. I’ll cove both right now
Display can show on websites that are within Google’s “display network.” In fact, Facebook & Google have the largest display networks which allow ads to show outside of their respective platforms.
You might see any of these Display manifestations as you browse the web.
You’ll notice banners on the sides of websites, popup videos, banners on YouTube, and Gmail ads.
Youtube is predominantly just the ads that play before or during a video you are watching.
For Display, clicks are very, very cheap, as low as $0.01 per click (sometimes up to $1.00 in highly targetted situations). And there is a lot of volume, you’ll see way more impressions with a much smaller budget in Display than you will in Search.
For YouTube, you can choose to pay per impression, conversion, view, and other metrics but for the most part, it is pretty inexpensive.
With both, you can choose to target audiences, which are just Google-defined “buckets” that are determined by one’s search history.
If you have been doing a lot of searching for Florida vacations, Google might put you in an audience for “Beach Bound Travellers.”
You can also target topics. Topics are ways that Google categorizes the content on sites, so you may want to target a topic of “Manufacturing” or “Coffee Blog.”
Lastly, you have the ability to Retarget, which is arguably both YouTube and Display’s main appeal. You can use Google Analytics to capture audiences of users in a way that you define. So let’s say you want to capture people who browsed at least three pages on your site but didn’t convert. You can do that.
Once whatever pre-defined audience has enough users in it, you can start showing them ads that will close that funnel and raise your account’s ROI.
You may be attracted to Display & YouTube’s high volume and extremely low costs per click but don’t be fooled. These two platforms are defined as very low intent because wherever they are showing, the user is most definitely there to find your product. They could be looking up the definition of a word, watching a trailer for their favorite movie and so on.
So even if you do them in a niche retargeting audience, you still can’t guarantee the user’s mindset as you can in Search.
It’s because of this that an unfettered Display campaign can end up raising your cost per conversion in your Google Ads account (unless your goal is just to drive relatively unqualified traffic to your site).
As I said, these two campaigns are best used on top of an optimized Search campaign.
I promised at the beginning that I would break this down into a simple chart so here it is:
| Campaign Type | Where Ads Show | What They Target | Costs (Relative) | Intent (Relative) |
| Search Ads | Search Results (Search Network) | Keywords | $$$ | +++ |
| Shopping Ads | Search & Shopping Results | Keywords (Listing Content) | $$$ | ++ |
| Display Ads | Websites, Gmail, YouTube | Audiences, Topics, Placements, Retargeting | $ | + |
| YouTube Ads | YouTube Videos | Audiences, Topics, Channels, Retargeting | $$ | + |
A really mature, well-oiled account will use most of Google’s placement offerings in various capacities. It’s always good for the optimization to be testing different campaign types, automation, targeting options, and more.
I will almost always recommend that an account starts with Search unless you have very strict awareness and traffic goals. You just can’t beat Its ability to target someone when they are asking a question. The amount of control you have over the experience you offer that user is unparalleled in any form of marketing.
If you have any more questions, please do not hesitate to reach out. If you submit the form here, you will be sent a link to schedule a meeting where we can discuss your specific situation and the general strategies that will help you achieve your goals quickly.
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