Scale Google Ads with the bottom-up funnel

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00:00so what you're looking at doing there is you're looking at owning the bottom of the funnel so your high intent keywords your high converting keywords I also find it's an easier way not as much data at the moment with performance Max and those type of campaigns you can find it quicker which landing pages are working which ad copies are working and then from there you essentially start into some remarketing all right welcome back everyone to the PPC Mastery podcast today I am joined by another special guest Mr Aaron Young he has the the biggest YouTube channel on on Google Ads which I'm super jealous of jealous of no kidding kidding of course uh yeah super cool to to have you on the channel Aaron uh before we dive into your um your backstory and your bottomup funnel approach which is I think is going to be super valuable to people I want to quickly ask you what is something that you believe about Google Ads that most people would disagree with that trying to find Advanced strategies are a complete waste of time and what's the context there yeah so for me I for me purely an advanced strategy and what I talk about that is people diving through Reddit or YouTube or LinkedIn to try and find the latest secret hack the reason why I got this is you know especially with the YouTube channel as you mentioned someone release a video and my inbox will be inundated of you know what do you think about this secret strategy or what do you think about this Advanced strategy and uh for me it all comes down to that you can't have come up with one EV bet strategy because because every client is different so for me purely if you were to look what what is an advanced strategy for me an advanced strategy is the stacking of foundational

01:38truths about Google Ads using it in the right way at the right time and so for me that's that's probably my my big thing yeah awesome uh I think also the the the reason that you are able to think about it in that sense shows your experience So speaking of your experience um yeah how would how how did you get started um in PPC and where are you now in your career Aaron feel free to ince yourself yes so my name's um Aaron Young people would know me from uh probably YouTube channel and Define Digital Academy but my first Google Ads campaign was actually a campaign we ran for our own business we had a Villa Resort that we started in barley and um we put in the initial Capital we hired a marketing agency and with all the promises and we got zero leads and just the way that it was structured we had a 12-month option to uh basically we had to get enough purchases to in order to be able to secure the the the the finalization of the project so I thought well if if it's going to be my money uh on the line I'm going to try everything so first we had 12 months to do it after three months we had absolutely nothing and I mean like zero like zero leads from this marketing agency not even in spam leads I would have accepted spam leads um we we got we got nothing um so I started I made of mine um had an e-commerce brand at the time and he started talking to me about Google Ads so we started that and then because you've got the risk of losing you know a little bit of money uh every morning and every night after work I was researching everything I could do about Google Ads you there wasn't really YouTube videos back then it was more blogs and just purely looking at the

03:16data myself and looking at what was happening very much just search campaign based um fast forward leads came in we secured the project uh then when we we actually ended up living in barley for four years and um I was having a conversation with a a hotel manager who was a a larger hotel and we worked out that he had a 50 Villa Resort I had only five Villas at that time but our website was earning more gross revenue than his website uh because he was getting all of his bookings through agents so it just started from there we ended up getting um you know other clients and um referrals and then I discovered that I just really loved the Google ad side of it so since we moved back in 2016 I um handed over the operation or the business we still own it still involved in the man management sorry the marketing side of it um but yeah then since then went and did white labeling to um to a lot of digital agencies as their head of digital we're just about to start our our own full service um agency and then Co hit um and I had the time to sort of reflect and I was going hang on I we were probably earning more money than what the digital agency owners were earning um and then I really even fundamentally saw a bit of a gap in the market um um there and this isn't a negative towards digital agencies there are some amazing agencies out there um but for a lot of small to medium businesses if they've only got a small amount of money to spend so you know even sometimes after under $110,000 um then their total marketing budget the agency isn't actually isn't a good fit for them and I even truly believe for a lot of business owners if you start especially if you're a startup

04:55if you can understand Google Ads yourself before you pass it on to an agency or you or you bring your your your brand or your business is much better set up so that's where Define Digital Academy came from um our Slanders probably we've got a real focus on teaching business owners uh how to use Google Ads now obviously we've got a lot of Google Ads Professionals in there and agency owners in there but I guess where where're I guess probably the passion of what really drives me is is allowing business owners to to take control of their own Google Ads campaigns yeah that's awesome because you know the impact that it has on on their yeah and and the YouTube thing came out of the blue like we you just mentioned we got the largest channel um we just crossed the line of 100,000 which is ridiculous I I literally when we started it um I yeah I I was I was looking at guys who had channels of like 15,000 and 20,000 going that that would just be ridiculous to get that many yeah yeah so um much to my daughter's discuss the thumbnails going to keep coming and uh yeah yeah did you get the YouTube uh plaque yet ordered it button yeah yeah ordered it and it should be coming in the next uh the next week or two H nice so I think you have an interesting background because uh like if you look at for me uh my path for example I started off at agency and and kind of you know started in this world that way but for you it's different you are you you really have that business owner perspective because as you said if your own money is on the line you're going to be doing different things than when it's other people's money so I can imagine that was a really good starting point for you to to really learn like is actually important here with with Google Ads because yeah when it's your own

06:33money then uh you know how much it's going to hurt if it's not converting so yeah and look I it definitely has framed I guess probably the way that I view Google Ads and the way that I've always view Google Ads is you know like other things like I the data you see inside of Google Ads is important and you need to be able to you need to be able to look at it and like your conversion data you need to be able to trust it but for me what's happening inside of Google Ads is nowhere near as important as what what's happening in the profit and loss sheet and the revenue of the business and that's why I've always questioned whenever we take on an account we we try to really drive the the business owner about you know let me know what's happening in your business and you know so that I really know the changes we're making in Google Ads I just don't want the Google Ads dashboard board to give me amazing results I want the the business to have amazing results yeah yeah I love that um all right so recently you um shared something about your approach to um starting and then grow growing Google Ads accounts with your bottomup funnel approach and I think this is a a really smart way of looking at Google Ads yeah um so could you explain what this approach is what that looks like and why it is so effective yeah so I I'll explain I guess probably the how I came to it the process and then the F thing I just want to preface is that as I break down the strategy if you've got an existing account please don't just stop everything to start this so we will have a bit of a discussion about if you've got a a a current Google Ads campaign and you wanted to try the strategy how you would do that so where it comes from is I guess probably two foundations and what I'm talking about that is is out of

08:11all the years of people coming to me for Google Ads it's come down to two core questions they can't get conversions or they can't scale and when you look at those two problems especially when you look at um people can't Scout that's where I think a lot of people go into the the the advanced strategy mode of trying to find New Tricks but if you break down scaling an account you've only got two ways that you can scale an account you either increase the spend on your current products or your current keyword terms or you reach out to cold audiences there there's no other levers that you can pull so the hell foundation of the bottom up funnel probably does really come from me being a business owner being a small business owner when I started uh that profit is such a high commodity so the bottom up funnel is essentially you start with um High intent so search if it's lead generation search and shopping if it's e-commerce the great thing about this as well now since last November with Google changing um the automatic priority to um to Performance Max so shopping has now got a we're seeing an uptick in in shopping and then essentially so what you're looking at doing there is you're looking at owning the bottom of the funnel so your high intent uh keywords find it's an easier way um not as much data at the moment with performance Max and those type of campaigns you can find it quicker which landing pages are working which ad copies are working and then from there you essentially start into some remarketing but then once you can no longer uh scale your account through increasing your your budgets and the way that you find that out is if you

09:48add in a budget increase to your search or your shopping campaigns or both by 20% and your CPC spikes by 30% you can no longer profitably scale that campaign so you then go up the funnel and we would do that through a performance Max campaign um I won't say Dynamic search we used to do Dynamic search because that's leaving this year um or in potential video campaigns but the the key difference is here with performance Max is the way that then we set performance Max up is that we set it to only target new customers um have campaign specific goals which is highly important for lead generation businesses which we we'll talk about after and then also adding your brand exclusions so you're not hitting you're branded and then when you can no longer scale through performance Max you then add in some video campaigns there are different options you could add video at the start you could also add in some demand gen but that's essentially what happens you start owning your own branded traffic High conversion traffic and then when you can no longer scale through budget increases you start reaching out to cult traffic yeah so it's actually the the opposite of what the traditional C think do funnel looks like where you try to raise top level awareness first and then get people to consider and then buy kind of flip it around and say no we want to start with the people that are the the the hottest the warmest leads and try to convert them first right yeah there is obviously if you're if you've got a product or service that no one knows about you may have to add in top of the funnel before bottom of the funnel so but for the majority of businesses that are looking to advertise and Google Ads

11:24there is some underlying High intent keyword traffic that we can Target yeah so um let's dissect that for a bit so let's say for example you have a legion client um what does it look like from the beginning what what what things do you look like to determine okay this is what I'm going to going to start with you mentioned for example for Legion you start with search campaign um how do you go and determine your for example uh High intent Search keywords Etc yeah so I mean that that process is probably nothing different like we go through the same process of you know making sure you structur your ad ad groups correctly um single single theme ad groups good ad copy the big difference for lead generation comes about in the conversion values uh one thing I don't know what your experience is but one thing I found performance Max is really really bad for lead generation when you're targeting form inquiries and phone calls um you generally see a spike but they're just poor quality so we we now do not add in performance Max for any Le gen Camp campaigns until we've got offline conversion data feeding in uh and that could be through a third party tool like HubSpot or Salesforce or Zoho or it could be a manual way that's it's done through um Google Sheets and importing the data back into Google Ads that then means that there's probably for performance for Le gen there's one extra setting that you need to be really careful of and that's so not only bidding for new customers not only removing your brand exclusions but having campaign specific goals so in a lead gen performance Max campaign we

13:01only put in the offline conversion goals into um the performance Max campaign and that then really stops the whole question of poor quality leads right yeah that's solid hey guys real quick if you like this episode don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss anything in the future and feel free to share with a friend colleague or family member cuz that's the only way we can grow this show all right back to the show and then for um um for for Ecom it's it's a little bit different OB obviously because you have the shopping component yeah what does that look like what we're finding with Ecom we get we're getting we now tested this uh in All Brands um different sizes what we're finding is that you spend more in performance Max but the conversions happen in shopping and we've got one campaign where it's performance Max is is hitting um a 3 3.2 uh row us with a conversion rate of about 2% um our search is is at 7% conversion rate and our shopping is at 12 conver uh 12% conversion rate but the one thing I would note there is that it took um the shopping kind of flat lines generally find for about three or four like when I mean flat lines it sits around the 3 to four or wherever that it's natural Rhythm hits for the for the for the for the campaign when you take on when you add in performance Max nothing really changes for a good somewhere between 45 to 90 days and then you start to see a really big spike and what basically my theories on this is that essentially because what we're doing is we're we're removing um we're saying the performance Max we only want you to Target new

14:37customers so then when they come through in in in a remarketing list um or are doing up follow-up search search shopping or display are the ones that that are converting right and do you um do you use any uh third party attribution tools or backend systems to um um to double check the whether performance Max is actually driving new customers or do you just stick to the the data inside of Google Ads yeah okay so for it's different so for Legion as I said we we very much um we would generally especially for larger accounts we would generally recommend either a you know a Zoho sales force or or HubSpot so that so that we can actually see the data in there as well for that to depending on the client um we've had some really interesting clients there was one which was a they could have anywhere from a a sale could be anywhere from $5,000 to up to $500,000 so we built a conversion hierarchy uh where if it was a good lead even if it didn't lead to a proposal or a but if he goes if their team s Sal Team market saying we want more leads like this it would get a nominal value of I think it was $5,000 if it got to the proposal we would then feed in the proposal and if it got to the sale they'll feed in the sale um so that really comes down to questioning the client um for Ecom as long as the business is happy with the the conversion tracking um especially through Shopify we don't usually use any other um some clients do um but but we we just make sure as long as they're

16:13happy with the conversion values but that probably also comes too especially with Ecom I I never I'm more really quiz the uh the business owner more about um M and really looking at so really looking at metrics of you know if we increase 10% in in Google Ads you know are you seeing a 10% or high increase in sales and revenue once we're happy with that and sometimes it can take a little while um to to to get right once we're happy with that then then we can move ahead and really start scaling yeah yeah that makes sense and um how do you evaluate the success of your bottom of funnel of your bottom uh bottom up approach uh before you decide to scale further by adding for example a the man gen video Etc yeah so so the the first marker is really the so we we put a lot of value on search impression share or Click Share uh so what I'm looking at there is we're really looking at um so when we will increase a scale we'll generally an increase by 10 or 20% and what we're really looking at is are we seeing any spikes in CPC so if the impression share is is low uh we're happy with the conversion metrics we go yeah we're pretty confident like was F to the client we got a high level of confidence like if we're under 20% we go look we've got a lot of room here it used to be uh we could push it up to about 65 70% now we are noticing there's some niches where even at like 45 50% we start we're starting to hit the CPC resistance so i' probably call it CPC CPC resistance is the first thing that we really look as at a marker where you can't increase any

17:52further um because of your increases in CPC it's making it unprofitable that's when we then move to the the other metrics and then from there like as I said I mean the way I explained it was performance Max and then up for other brands it's not performance Max it's video um it really comes back to we look at what's the makeup of the client if they have a lot of really good video assets or things like that we We'll add them in at different times yeah and um I was actually I thought about this um uh since in Google Ads we talked about it on your on your show as well how important uh for example landing pages are yeah is that something that you uh do for your clients as well or or or how does that generally work um is that something that you discuss and then they do it themselves or you do it what does that work yeah so I I one of the agencies I used to consult to they had a I've had him on my channel a couple of times um there's a there's a company at Australia called test mate and they've run uh over 10,000 live user tests so that was and he's they've actually got five core data points that they work on for for landing page which is all about obviously your topold headline your um your your Authority markers your pricing and your design so we do work on that I now don't do it personally um but I do have some core kpis that I look at inside of Google Ads and they are that for uh e-commerce if I'm seeing a conversion rate of under 3% I'm taking a deeper dive for Leen if I'm seeing a conversion rate of under 7% I'm taking a

19:29deeper dive now it may not mean that there's something wrong but it's just a warning sign for me and in terms of uh bidding what does that look like in the bottom of funnel approach do you just go for smart bidding or do you use a lot of manual bidding what does that look like yeah it for me it really it really comes down to what the user is comfortable with and that's why I really don't see it as a strategy it's more of a framework and a process now personally me uh I this may change in the future but at the moment when I'm starting I still like to start on maximize clicks and that's just purely because I like to move over to Smart bidding as as fast as possible so generally with search and shopping we'll start with Max bidding uh although I have noticed with that example I gave before with the shopping account uh shopping campaign at the bottom of the funnel converting at 12% it's still got a a Target row us of 100% And the shopping uh and the row us has just been going up so I haven't been G to touch it um so yeah so we still use Smart bidding obviously with uh when we introduce performance Max I'll generally start maximize conversion value um and then start a Target R later down the track and I'll use conversion value for both e-commerce and Le genen because we're we're only using performance Max with a um with the value leading in so it doesn't that's what I was kind of saying it doesn't really restrict um on the bidding side it's more looking at now the other thing from there as well is you could have potentially multiple campaigns so you could have different funnels uh bottom up funnels running in the same account based around services and based around product categories the beauty of that is is that you might have a product category that is a lot more

21:08profitable faster and you can start stepping that up and scaling that up quicker than another one or you could have different seasonality concerns so with seasonality you might have you know a time where you kind of pull down on some of that top of the funnel or middle of the funnel um spending uh when you're out of season yeah and um are there any um let's wrap this up here are there any other things that are important to consider with this with this approach like maybe some challenges that you frequently encounter or just other things that we haven't discussed for me it's still just very much just having a a the core thing is I guess going back to one of my first topics is is really understanding how each campaign works and so for me um because Google will very much push at the moment like demand gen is sorry performance Max REM markets now it does remarket but if you with you you really break down to how performance Max works it can go into the Display Network it can go into all the other networks if it picks you up on it radar it's going to bid higher for you so by having a separate display campaign uh with performance Max targeting new customers only um we're seeing a lot lower cpcs on display and shopping because we're we're stopping that smart bidding from uh you know retargeting four or five touch points in some someone's Journey where we're breaking them out into different campaigns so that would be the biggest thing is just really I guess before you dabble into this it would be really having an understanding of how each campaign works and how each campaign type works and having some experience with it so that you can then layer it together yeah solid yeah we in our um uh

22:47in our chat on your show we also talked about the fundamentals yeah I think you also agree that those are are super important I've heard you mention it a couple times in this uh in this chat as well what do you think are the the most important fundamentals um yeah that really go into the found Foundation of a good Google Ads campaign these days I still put a high high price on clickthrough ratio and I know that's probably not as not as popular now but for me that still talks relevancy uh the other thing is as well is that the you know Google is still driven by clicks so there is fundamentally a you know every platform and I think that's why one of the reasons for why um our YouTube channel is growing so so quick as well is I treated my YouTube channel like I treated a Google Ads campaign and and try to look at what what does YouTube want so I go what does Google want when it comes to Google Ads they want clicks so if you can put a high price on your clickthrough ratio you're always going to get now it used to be you know a lot more about your ad quality rank now there's other factors in there um but it it it definitely is still a big a big part then we move to conversion rates and and you know conversion rate I'm really looking at what's happening with conversion rates if we're not converting why are we're not converting it and I look for the disconnect is it the is it the targeting is it the ad copy or is it something on the landing page of the offer and they're really the only three places that it can be um and then the last thing is is so I probably put a higher value on search and pression share than many other people would because that talks to me about how I can scale so for me I always look at with the metrics what is the metrics telling

24:25me and uh and where do I need to optim if my metric support yeah nice one yeah especially on search impression share um I was so happy when Google released search impression share data for performance Max uh a couple months ago because that was definitely one of the core reasons why you could still uh say that standard shopping had had a big Edge over performance Max because yeah without search impression share you just don't really know if you're already hitting that ceiling or not then if you push harder and you're already at 90% impression share then you know your CPC is just gonna going to go through the roof so I was super happy that Google uh gave us that data which is which is awesome um all right so Aaron I think this uh this was really valuable the bottom of funnel approach I think it's going to give a lot of people um yeah a framework to use especially from the beginning on how you can drive results uh uh I guess this would Al also work on a limited budget because you're focused on the things that are much more likely to get a get a conversion so that's awesome so what I want to do I was just going to say one real real quick thing and that would be the warning I gave at the start is if you've got a current account going don't just change it over if you did want to try this in essentially if you're on a very performance Max heavy account which a lot of people are I would look by starting to introduce search and shopping so you introduce the bottom of the funnel so you don't mess with what is happening at the top introduce the bottom and then you can start going up further from there yeah that's that's good and I think that goes for everything you read online or any strategy you come across just always use your brain and think is this relev for me at this time don't blow up an account that's the biggest thing yeah yeah yeah

26:03especially if it's already working with the you know smart bidding is super fickle and uh yeah it can you can really harm your performance with small changes let alone big structural changes um so what I want to do now Aaron is just transition into a few rapid fire questions feel free to just shoot and answer one one word answer or give a little bit more context as you please um the first one is match um is it good or is it bad uh good nice uh would you prefer uh shopping standard shopping campaigns or performance Max campaigns for Ecom up until November last year I would have said if I could only choose one performance Max but now I've switched back to shopping because of the prioritization yeah solid any other reasons why you prefer standard shopping over pmax um I I just think because is shopping with in in high intent you can you can move that way you still got um also you still get better better data R Points uh from what you get without performance Max I still love performance Max but if you were to give me one and you're an e-commerce brand if you only had to do one I would do shopping solid all right this is uh whether you prefer for your for your client portfolio Legion or e-commerce o it's hard cuz I started in Legion um but I I really do like e-commerce uh but then I I like both so um if you if you're giving me SL say one way I would say Ecom nice it's a the challenge of

27:43Ecom is nice but I also think that the Simplicity of Legion is also is also quite nice much more straightforward even though you have like back ends and and offline conversions Etc I think uh feed management and and yeah generally low conversion rates on product pages makes it challenging for eom legion's one of those ones that in in theory it's simpler but it's really really technical now with the offline conversions um and it so Leen without offline conversions is a complete nightmare now so that that's um yeah so but once you get that it is a lot easier in terms of structure less generally less less campaigns and you can scale a lot easier yeah absolutely and also um uh you know if you look at where your impact is with Google Ads inside the interface outside I think with Leen especially um it's even more skewed towards what you do outside of it yeah you know also with and and the hard thing in Google Ads management is as well is the you know you can get those clients every then when you say you know we had a client where they go oh the the lead quality is bad the lead quality is bad but they had a call recording and then we when we played back the call recording to them we're going these are like perfect clients for you but your sales staff are being rude to them and and yeah they they changed the sales staff exact same settings in the campaign and it completely changed over so there are some other factors you need to think about with Le genen absolutely um what is your if you have it what is your favorite PPC tool at the moment um I'm yeah know I would say um Mike still I still love Mike Rhodes' um performance Max script yeah definitely

29:22one of the best um okay next one do you think Google is going to lose more market share in the in the next couple of months or years um no but I think the market share that it holds will be different and I think there'll be a lot more a high slant towards YouTube nice uh do you think Google's going to remove keyword match tapes this year uh no and part of the um I don't think they ever will completely I think it'll drastically change I could see a world where phrase match is gone um I still think there are some large industries that need exact match I don't know if you've ever dealt with anything in Australia uh you different countries have different regulations but um anything to do with superannuation insurance um even supplements is really really highly regulated I remember there's been quite a few campaigns where it's I'm not dealing with the brand manager I'm dealing with the lawyer about what we can say and what we can't say um so I think there is still a real need for for that and then some of these brands are spending like you know millions of dollars so I don't think Google will lose that um but I think for me I've been on the record to say that that phrase match is already dead uh but Google will push uh search Match uh search search Max more more yeah fair enough all right cool so I have one final question for you Aaron if you had to give PC experts whether they are experienced or beginners one tip that could improve their career what would that be yeah I'd say regardless of you know once you've been in the career for for 2 years uh or more so 2 years 10 years plus I would say start teaching um

31:00now that doesn't need to be in LinkedIn doesn't need to be in YouTube it could even be like a mentor role inside of your own company um I just think the more you teach the more you get a real core understanding of how Google Ads works so that that would be and the other side to that I really find about it is that you know before I started uh Define Digital Academy I'd been in the industry for doing Google Ads for like 10 11 years and and I still enjoyed it but it was just getting a bit training uh whereas uh you know doing what I'm doing now has just given me a new lease on uh on on my Google Ads life and I I I really have ref Fallen back in love with with the um with the platform awesome yeah there's a quote from Robin Sharma that I've always remembered is he said teacher learns most and um yeah you definitely see it with u in in Google Ads I I noticed it in my career as well the moment I started to create content and as you said can also be internally was was when I was forced to think about it on a on a deeper level if you try to explain something to someone then uh yeah your your thinking process becomes much clearer you discover the gaps in your own knowledge and uh yeah I think that's a that's a really great tip and I think of someone like you know like who I know that you are as well um I I take really seriously what I put out there into the the ecosphere of of LinkedIn and YouTube so because I do know that people do you know people do reat which I'm sure you've had too that you know this bit of teaching Sav my business or saved my campaign so it it really makes you really think about it and probably even test it more before you release it

32:37um so like for example the bottom up funnel that we just spoke about I was using that um over 12 months ago but I just wasn't prepared to to share it um until I'd really really tested it through in a lot of different test cases awesome well Aaron thanks so much for uh for coming on uh where can people connect with you uh definitely subscribe to your YouTube channel is it just called uh yeah it's Aaron Young or Define Digital Academy but just just Aaron Young if not just look for the silly thumbnails um and also on LinkedIn and then um also definedigitalacademy.com awesome okay well thank you so much for coming on this was awesome and for everyone else thank you for listening watching don't forget to like subscribe all this stuff and we'll catch you on the next episode Peace all right that's the end of this episode of the BBC Mastery podcast I hope you enjoyed it and if you don't want to miss any future episodes we're going to be back next week then don't forget to subscribe and share with a friend family member or a colleague uh cuz that's the only way we can grow this show now there's two more things I want to share with you if you want to take your Google Ads game to the next level the first one is if you want to get advanced Google Ads tips delivered straight into your inbox on Mondays and Fridays head over to PBC mastery.com newsletter to subscribe to our newsletter called the PBC Edge and next to that if you want to really really really take your skills to the next level and become the best Google ad specialist you can possibly be then consider joining the PPC Hub which is our coaching and Community platform for experienced Google Ads specialist you can find everything about it on PBC mastery.com Hub and with that said I'll catch you in next week's episode Peace