Demand Gen best practices

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00:00what's up and welcome to this new the PPC Mastery podcast episode about demand gen best practices and in this episode I quickly want to discuss some best practices around the main gen campaigns already that are well basically best practice from my end the stuff that I know already but also a lot of best practice from from Google themselves so I have been lucky to test the dimension campaign type within just one account already this is a bigger International client I haven't really gathered a lot of data and a lot of learnings already but I want to share some best practices and some know-how already so maybe you can well you can utilize this information when you're going to set up your First Dimension campaign a lot of this information is going to be based on well Google's best practices as well as well what they basically meant us as advertisers to do when setting up a dimension campaign so let's dive in let's dive in so in this episode I want to zoom in on six key areas which are conversion tracking structure budgets bidding strategy creatives and audiences so let's quickly go through them and let's start off with the conversion tagging part so I think it is important to implement a Google Ads conversion tracking conversion action which is basically a Gtech pixel because you want to rely on a Gtech pixel sa conversion action for your

01:40upper funnel campaigns since the attribution is a little bit more clear and you're able to leverage additional features like future and engage conversions as well but what I see from practice is when you are going to utilize a offline conversion tracking import for example that your OCT conversion action is well is is having troubles properly attributing the offline conversion towards your mid and upper funnel campaign types so what I have seen happening in my accounts especially looking at this display Discovery and YouTube campaigns is that the regular Gtech the Google as conversion tracking pixel is able to attribute a lot of more conversions towards your upper frontal campaign types than octs so make sure to to leverage this conversion action when you're going to experiment with Dimension also which is quite obvious make sure to have data driven attribution enabled so Google is well giving you more information about the customer journey and the conversion path from your dimension campaign all the way up to your well Low Bottom water funnel search shopping campaign in the near future what you also want to do when going to experiment with a dimension campaign is utilizing a third-party software tool so what I've seen happening is that Google Ads is really becoming quite aggressive saying that certain conversions are coming from their end and their ecosystem whereas other well other

03:19campaign types that are well off platform like meta ads or LinkedIn ads or even other channels like organic email also basically had a attribution towards the conversion so if you're going to experiment with the dimension campaign type make sure to incorporate a third-party attribution tool like Northbeam or Rockerbox or whatever you you like to fully understand what's happening at the back so you can properly well take a look at the attribution and properly report on what's actually happening from your dimension campaign because Google Ads might be over attributing a lot when when when utilizing a campaign type like this so next up campaign structure well basically when we're going to look at the campaign structure best practices a lot of the best practices apply to other campaign types as well so if you take a look at BMX or search basically you want to consolidate whenever possible you want to consolidate on ad group level and you want to consolidate on ad group you want to consolidate on campaign level and on ad group level whenever that is possible and it makes sense and that applies to demand gen campaign types as well when you're going to experiment with a dimension campaign you want to make sure that you do not make any changes in the first couple of two weeks which is a well learning period for the dimension campaign because Google is saying that it needs at least 50 conversions to properly understand

04:57where your audience is hanging out in their ecosystem and you do not want to well mess with the algorithm before the first 50 conversions are being well are being measured so you want you do not want to make any changes in the first two weeks and you want to wait for at least 50 conversions before making any changes so that's a lot of volume you need in order to well make the first couple of optimizations within the Mansion already then when we take a look at the budget side of things the recommended minimum budget is really really really high so this new campaign type is basically only applicable to the bigger advertisers across the world because you need at least 100 to 500 euros per day per ad group so that's not even talking about campaign level so the recommended test budget according to Google is 15 to 50K across a period from four to six weeks so that's a lot of budgets so that means that this new campaign type is not being applicable or not being the best choice for a lot of small to medium size advertisers so you need a lot of budget in order to test with this campaign type so and that testing budget isn't even going going to guarantee you any results so you need to be able to allocate this test budget and be able to fully drain

06:36it as well if it cannot drive you any results luckily the bigger advertisers have already experimented or have Incorporated Discovery campaigns already and basically demand gen is going to replace Discovery so if you have some historical data from your Discovery campaigns already you might be able to tell if the man gen is going to work for you or not at the same time Dimension incorporates a video action campaign or like well ad type and also best practices so you can also take a look at your video action campaigns if you have if you rent these in the best or maybe you're even running them right now to see if dimanjian could be a wise option for you to to incorporate within your campaign structure so be very mindful about flipping the switch and testing with the man gen because you need a lot of budget 15 to 50K over a period of four to six weeks to properly test this for your account and you should be able to to waste this if it isn't going to give you any traction so keep that in mind if you take a look at the at the at the bidding strategy well this is where it becomes a little bit interesting as well so according to Google Ads documentation you need to set a minimum budget that is times 20 your average order value divided by your target row as or if you want to bid on a

08:16Target CPA bidding strategy then you need a budget that is at least 15 times as high as your target CPA or expected CPA if you do not have a Target CPA from the very first beginning so let's say you have a non-branded search GPA of 100 euros then I like to use the rule of fist of multiplying that times two in order to well start off with a Target CPA for my mid and upper funnel campaigns so if I were to run a display or YouTube video for action campaign then I like to use the times to non-branded search GPA as my well new Target so let's say your target CPI is 200 Euros for a dimension campaign then you need to multiply that multiply that by 15 times and that will be your average daily budget so 15 times 200 Euros is I guess three three thousand Euros per day and that's a lot of money that's a lot of money so if you were to multiply multiply that daily budget by 30 days then well you can calculate what your minimum monthly spent will be in order to fully give the algorithms the room to search for your ideal customer profile that it's actually going to convert and they will need this information to and these volumes to find your ideal customer in order to properly give you consistent consistent returns and the chances are that you aren't

09:54going to see any conversion at all and that you are going to be wasting your budget during the test period so that is a very very very big disclaimer that you should be able to well yeah that that you should keep in mind before doubling in so that's budget wise you need a lot of budgets and a lot of daily budget in order to to allocate this within your account structure so just to recap this I think the main gen is only applicable for the biggest advertisers that are really looking for ways to scale and to plant the seeds into their ideal customer Minds in the mid and upper funnel for Mid and small size advertisers you really really want to max out the bottom of the funnel campaign types first like search shopping maybe even BMX then I would suggest experimenting with a campaign specific types like display and video for action and then if you are seeing somewhat great returns from those or profano emit of the funnel campaign types already then you want to start experimenting with the man gen I do not think you want to experiment any sooner as a small color to mid-size Advertiser and I think the same could be applicable for the larger advertisers as well so keep that in mind then looking at bidding strategies well if you take a look at bidding strategies you can select up to five bidding strategies inside of the man gen so you have the possibility to select a campaign goal in the first step of the campaign Wizard and those are conversions clicks or

11:34conversion value and up and based on the selection based on your campaign goal you will see up to five different bidding strategies so if you select conversions you will be able to select maximize conversions and that is the applicable or the recommended starting point if you want to focus on maximize conversions while you want to make the switch towards a specific Target CPA once you have reached the 50 conversions thresholds so if you select this campaign goal you can then later on select a Target CPA as well if you select clicks you're able to well only select one bidding strategy and you aren't really able to select this bidding strategy because the campaign widget will do it for you and that is maximize clicks and lastly when you select conversion value as a campaign goal you will see two options either maximize conversion value and that is the recommended starting point for you if you are well measuring varying conversion values as a Ecom player for example or a SAS player and later on you can make the switch to Target row as if you have gathered minimum 50 conversions within this campaign type during the testing phase so those are the the different bidding strategies that you can utilize once again the ideal starting point should be maximize conversions or maximize conversion value and then make this transition to either Target CPA or target.s once you have 50 conversions in

13:13place and I think you only want to use the maximize clicks bidding strategy if you do not have a performance goal to be completely honest I think if you were to select maximize clicks you will be wasting your budgets quite heavily because Google will definitely just fill in the low quality placements inside of their ecosystem first well since they do not have to look at the possible conversions of a placement so if you are not going to utilize maximize conversions or maximize conversion value and later on target drawers or Target CPA then I would stay away because I think you will be definitely wasting your budget if you're going to utilize maximize clicks okay then let's take a look at creatives well basically what you can do inside of the campaign wizard is you can create multiple ad groups and within each ad group you have the opportunity or the possibility to create multiple different ads and multiple different ad types so you can select three different ad types a video ad a single image ad and a carousel image ad which is new within every single ad group and that is quite interesting on ad group level you're able to select a audience so basically you want to consolidate your your audiences on ad group level and then create specific different ad types for the specific placement Types on ad group

14:53level per audience so to say so if you're looking at the video ads you have the possibility to add up to five different videos including shorts there's no specific short option so you cannot really select a a I want to only Leverage The YouTube shorts format so you have to incorporate different in-stream YouTube ads and different short ads inside of that one specific video at placement type so add up to five videos then you're able to add up to five headlines five long headlines that contains 90 characters each five description lines that also contain 90 characters each you can then select a call to action a business name a business logo and you can select up to well I think four site links and these site links can be shown together with your in-stream at for for example and if you have been running dedicated video action campaigns before then you should know that you can also include site links over there as well so well that's it for video ads then if you take a look at single image ads that is quite similar to a responsive display ad so you can add up to 20 images into three different aspect ratios so a landscape mode a portrait mode a square a ratio so preferably you want to utilize every single aspect ratio then you can add up to five different logos

16:31into different aspect ratios as well five headlines with 40 characters instead of 30 characters each then five description lines and one call to action and a business name and then we have the carousel image ads type which is new and this is quite cool in my opinion and this is where you can basically create a carousel ads that consists consists up to 10 different cards that are swipeable and every single card has up to three Unique Images or three images that could be the same into three different aspect ratios as well so Square portrait and landscape modes and for every single card you can also utilize a unique fun URL and a unique call to action and this is basically a carousel ad that is quite similar to The Meta ads Carousel ad and well this can be shown into the Discover page the Discover feed inside of the Google app on Android devices for example so that's quite interesting because I haven't seen this before and we haven't seen this before inside of other campaign types so for all of the assets and all of the ads you really want to leverage your own creatives so since you really need a high test budget of at least 15 to 50K in the first four to six weeks you really want to pay attention to the quality of your ads and your assets so you do not want to leverage any stock images stock videos or long crappy business videos for your well video ads for example because this

18:12will definitely not work and this will definitely not work on well YouTube short placements because these really need to be optimized for all of these specific placements that you that your dimension at can can deliver on so since the minimum budget is so high I think a case could be made to allocate a few thousands of Euros in order to properly create ads yourself for this new type as well so if you're going to experiment with this with this and you're going to allocate let's say 30k during the test period then well I think it is more than reasonable to allocate up to 5K for Creative creation as well to hire a video agency to create in-stream YouTube ads YouTube short specific ads really nice images that can complement your video ads as well that are optimized for mobile screens there's all there are a lot of best practices I would recommend looking up the ABCD framework for video ads for example this is the attract brand connect direct framework that YouTube basically uses as a best practice to generate and create YouTube ads and YouTube shorts for so really pay attention to your own creatives before doubling into Dimension campaign types also what you can do and what you can think about is to replicate your video action campaigns since I think YouTube placements are going to be a very big part of well the spent allocation within

19:51the main gen campaigns so if you have done video action campaigns in the past you might want to take a look at what has worked well for you and what well what didn't work so you can afford making mistakes or you can avoid using creatives that are really giving you poor or gave you poor performing results so take a look at your historical data as well also keep in mind the channel temperature and this is a very very big one because you're going to be advertising in the top of the funnel and mid of the funnel instead of the Google Ads ecosystem and that means that a lot of people will not know your brand and will not know about your service so make sure to use a call to action or use a offer that matches the channel temperature so do not copy your performance Max headlines and description lines for example that are focused towards book a consultation now or book a demo now or take a look at our prices or whatever or contact us today those are way too hot and way too warm call to actions that are really applicable for search bottom of the funnel Focus performance Max campaigns but they are really not applicable for upper funnel and mid funnel campaign types like the man gen YouTube display and until now Discovery so make sure to really think about hey what creatives and what kind of offers and call to actions can we use to to

21:29introduce our brand interview introduce our Solutions introduce our services products to our to our ICP ideal customer profile that makes sense and that isn't really hard to complete so think about this real good before starting to create your assets and before you're actually going to set live your dimension campaign then well during the testing phase you really need some budget first and you really need to give it some space so at least two weeks after the launch then you can start making changes inside of your assets and audiences for example if you see bad performing assets then try to swap swap them out as soon as possible in order to optimize your dimension campaigns right from the start so to say so that's it yeah with regards to creatives then let's take a look at audiences real quick and this is the last part and this is quite interesting as well because we have seen some new features over here that might be that might be rolling out inside of other campaign types in the near future as well so basically what we have seen and this is the new feature we have seen new look-alike audiences that basically give you the opportunity to expand upon your seed lists and your seed lists are basically your first party data lists that can be remarketing lists that can be customer list and it is really up to you how segmented these lists are inside of your audience inside of Dimension you

23:09can select up to 10 well seat lists and you can create a custom combination of remarketing lists customer lists that can be segmented or not yourself and then based on those seedless you can ask Google Ads to expand on those lists and you basically have the opportunity to create a very narrow expansion that starts with two and a half percent up to a broad expansion that goes to 10 percent and that basically looks at your ideal first party customer data segments and then expands on the top two and a half five ten percent of your first party data to look for well new potential customers and this is the first expansion that you can actually do based on your first party data segments then on ad group level you have also the opportunity to select optimize targeting so you can first create a look-alike segment based on your first party data which is already going more Broad and then on ad group level you can decide to whether or not create optimized targeting that will even that will will broaden up your audience targeting even more so keep in mind that your audiences inside of Dimension are targeting they are not signals like you are used to within BMX but they become signals if you decide to enable optimize targeting

24:49and when you're going to experiment with your look-alike segments starting from narrow up till abroad so that's quite interesting this is a new feature and I think how it looks yeah what I think I think they will be rolling this out to other campaign types as well like performance Max maybe even display maybe even YouTube slash video campaigns right now they're only applicable to Dimension but it looks that well integrated that other campaign types might be utilizing this feature in the near future as well so what I would suggest from the start try to only utilize your best audience segments first stay as close to your first party data audience segments and maybe create a small narrow look-alike segment based on that then also create custom in-market audiences based on Google Google well the top performer and Google Search terms for example and wait for the optimize starting feature in the very first start what I would suggest is to only broaden up and use optimize targeting if you have well converted some clicks already and if you are running on a Target CPA and Target row s already so you really have to go past the learning period first then make this switch from Max conversions to Target CPA or maximize conversion value to Target OS and then start experimenting with what optimized targeting can do and how it can expand on your audience segments from there if you start off

26:27with with Optimus targeting from the very first start I think you are going too broad too soon especially since you're not utilizing a Target CPA or Target row as from the very first start so keep that in mind also you can well broaden up your audience segments before switching to optimize targeting so if you start off with a really specific narrow segmented out audience segment inside of your audience audience essentially then you can start off with broadening up that first adding in more broad search terms for example or broader in Market audiences or maybe even broader customer customer lists or remarketing lists and then after you're seeing great results and you want to expand even further after that specific moment start to expand on optimize targeting because that will give you the control that you might be looking for in the first couple of weeks when testing out this new campaign type so those are really the most important best practices right now so to finalize and to give you more my honest opinion about this campaign type is that I think this is a great campaign type for a lot of mature bigger advertisers that are looking to expend their reach and that are looking to well plant the right seats inside of the heads of potential interesting future customers I think it should be if it works a always-on

28:05campaign so if it if it is giving you great results you want to run this campaign in order to well to work on your brand exposure to maybe increase your conversion lifts your brand lifts Etc so for those advertisers that are really focused on increasing brand awareness and product and brand consideration in the mid and upper phase well it's a great consideration to include this campaign type if you are a low to mid-size Advertiser that isn't really mature and you haven't experimented with Discovery video for Action campaigns display at all or you haven't even maxed out bottom of the funnel campaign types like pmax search shopping then you really really want to max out and try with and try to experiment with those campaign main type specific or campaign specific types first before doubling into demand gen because I think you really should should be mature and you really should be sitting on a big budget when Dimension could be interesting for you so I'm interesting to see case studies in the future about advertisers hopefully successfully utilizing this new campaign type it is really new right now I think there isn't really a lot of data as of this very moment but yeah hopefully I can give you some more heads up and more results about the case that I'm currently running but I think other mature Google s Specialists and other accounts are already doing tests with this or as well so those people and those Specialists might be sharing their

29:45first reactions and their first results with us SD community in the near future as well so stay tuned hopefully you found this episode interesting and it gave you some nice little insights and hopefully this I hope to see you around in the next future the PPC Mastery podcast episode so see you around and bye bye ciao