5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Your SaaS Google Ads Campaigns by Andrew Steven

While SaaS companies can sell direct to consumers (DTC), they more often rely on business-to-business (B2B) SaaS leads. Because the selling cycle is longer and more complex for B2B transactions, SaaS companies often face unique advertising challenges.

Five of the most common mistakes companies make when using Google Ads for SaaS are: using broad keywords that focus on information rather than driving sales, not targeting the right audience, assuming an ad can run on autopilot rather than continuously monitoring and improving SaaS Google Ads conversion rates, not scaling budget to focus on the highest performing ads, and ignoring users who engaged with an ad but did not take the desired action.

SaaS Ad Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

SaaS ads don’t usually fail for just one reason. More often, several mistakes derail Google Ads campaigns. Here’s a deeper look into mistakes commonly made:

Too Much Emphasis on Information

People use generic keywords to collect information. However, these keywords are not effective at driving traffic to SaaS business sites, generating quality B2B SaaS leads, or boosting SaaS Google ads conversion rates.

For example, someone trying to understand a concept might Google 'what is project management software' and get a long list of research results. On the other hand, someone who enters 'what is the best project management software for zoo construction' is more likely to have a real need.

If your product is designed for zoo construction management, the user is more likely to find you if the keywords in your ad align with your specialty and mention your location. Targeted keywords also reduce the number of irrelevant clicks and improve your return on ad spend (ROAS).

Incorrect Targeting

Understand your audience. If you don’t target the right audience, your ad will fall flat. Google Ads has audience-targeting features that can help SaaS companies reach the stakeholders who are actively searching for solutions in a particular space. If you don’t use precise targeting in your ad campaign, you run the risk of wasting valuable time and resources.

Forgetting to Optimize Performance

Evaluate your ads to determine which search terms are most effective. Ensure landing pages are directly related to the ads, and calls to action (CTAs) are easy to understand and execute.

Regularly checking in on your campaigns also allows you to correct mistakes and boost conversions. Remove irrelevant search terms and revise the copy to align with intent and audience segmentation.

Also, spend some time learning how your competitors’ ads are positioned and how well they are performing. Use these insights to fine-tune your ads and brand marketing.

In addition to optimizing ads, don’t forget to optimize your landing pages. It won’t matter how engaging your ads are. If an ad directs users to a landing page that is confusing or unrelated to their search, your advertising efforts will go nowhere. Make sure the landing page loads correctly and quickly, the page communicates the value of your product or service, and there is a clear CTA.

Not Allocating Enough Resources to High-Performing Ads

Without ongoing oversight, money can easily be wasted on underperforming ads. Conversely, if resources aren’t invested in high-performing ads, opportunities can be lost.

Use insights collected during your campaign audits to direct resources to the places showing the best results. Continue to evaluate any adjustments and make more changes as needed.

Forgetting About Users Who Passed on a Previous Ad

Users who are already familiar with your brand are easier to convert than those who have never heard of it before. Retargeting an ad is not always easy to do, but it is essential to boosting conversions.

This is especially true for B2B SaaS sales that have long selling cycles. A potential customer may have loved your product when they saw it last year, but the timing wasn’t right to take action.

Your ads should highlight the features and benefits the user was searching for in the past. A series of ads that each address different pain points may be effective because they address different parts of the purchasing lifecycle.

Segment target audiences based on their previous actions. For example, someone who visits a pricing page is probably closer to making a purchase than someone who only reads the history of the company or visits the management team page.

Wrapping Up

To avoid making costly mistakes during your SaaS Google ad campaigns, reach out to BERK Labs. We are a full-service digital marketing and product development agency that can help accelerate growth for your SaaS business!

Key Metrics for Better SaaS Google Ads Management Conversion Rate by Andrew Steven

When you run a Google Ads campaign, you want to know how well it achieves your marketing goals. To do this, adopt SaaS Google Ads management best practices for monitoring and analyzing ad performance against key performance indicators (KPIs).

The Google advertising platform allows companies to track key metrics such as Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Conversion Rate, and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) to help measure return on ad spend (ROAS) and success of a Google Ads campaign.

An Explanation of SaaS Google Ads Metrics

By closely monitoring key Google Ads metrics and adjusting SaaS Google Ads campaigns accordingly, SaaS companies can maximize their marketing efforts and boost conversions.

Conversions are the ultimate goal of any ad. The conversion rate metric tells you how many users perform the call to action (CTA) in an ad.

Actions could be making a purchase, downloading information, signing up for a loyalty program, etc. Conversions can occur on a website landing page, a mobile app, or on the telephone. Each type of conversion needs to be tracked separately.

Conversion data can provide insights, such as:

CTR: The more clicks on an ad, the more the ad is resonating with your audience. A user may make multiple searches and interact with multiple ads or the same ad more than once.

CPC and CPA: Knowing the cost of each click and the cost of acquiring a customer helps identify the most effective ads and keywords so you can manage your budget more effectively.

ROAS: This metric helps advertisers make marketing decisions by showing how profitable each ad is. How you measure ROAS will depend on your goals.

There is always room for improvement. Once you have a clear sense of how an ad is performing, it’s time to dig a little deeper.

The Devil Is in the Details

There are many reasons why an ad might be underperforming. Rather than ditching an ad because it’s not up to par, take a closer look to see if there are aspects of the ad that can be massaged to boost performance. For example, make sure the ad copy and offer are compelling and relevant, the landing pages directly relate to ad content, the call to action is easy to complete, and that enough budget is allocated to give an ad a chance of being successful.

Also, use the search terms report to see how well search terms entered on the Google search engine match the keywords used in your ads. Use these insights to concentrate on keyword selection that includes your SaaS specialty. Add high-performing keywords to your campaign and move under-performing keywords to a negative keyword list.

Check the Quality Score of an ad. This Google metric assesses how relevant the content, keywords, and landing pages are to users. The better the score, the more likely the ads will generate click-throughs, appear in high positions on search results, and deliver meaningful results.

Search Impression Share will tell you how often your ad appeared on searches. This metric could indicate that your ads aren’t reaching their full potential. Conversely, if the conversion rates are high and the search impression share is low, you may want to invest more in the ad.

The Auction Insights report provides information about the performance of competitor ads. This data may indicate that you need to reassess your audience targeting, keyword strategies, or budget to elevate your position and gain the upper hand over your competitors.

Metrics for Success

Tracking key metrics is critical to the success of SaaS Google Ads campaigns. They provide valuable benchmarks that can be used to measure and optimize advertising and marketing efforts and budgets. They can also be leveraged to develop marketing strategies that improve ad performance and prioritize the most profitable campaigns.

Start by focusing on the basics and expanding the metrics you follow on the Google Ads platform. To be successful, Google Ads need to be constantly monitored by someone who is focused on how to generate leads for SaaS.

If you need a hand with elevating your Google Ads for B2B SaaS marketing, turn to BERK Labs and join the ranks of other notable organizations who trust our professionalism and expertise in the digital marketing world!

Generating Leads for Your SaaS Business with Google Ads 101 by Andrew Steven

Google Ads provides companies based on a Software as a Service (Saas) business model access to the 16.4 billion searches that take place on the Google platform every day.

To attract and convert high quantities of meaningful leads, it’s essential to clearly identify your target audience, use the right keywords in your ads, create enticing copy with a clear call to action (CTA), optimize landing pages, track and measure ad performance, track competitor ads, and circle back to visitors who have not yet taken the desired action.

If the prospect of learning how to generate leads for SaaS or the ins and outs of SaaS Google Ads management is more than you bargained for, consider using a reputable Google Ads agency for SaaS like BERK Labs.

Benefits of Using Google Ads

Despite the introduction of other search engines, Google still dominates. The Google Ads platform allows you to target audiences (and micro audiences) with different attributes.

This tool can make your SaaS Google Ads campaigns more efficient at driving qualified consumers to your site, building brand reputation, and increasing website traffic. It also allows you to adjust your ad campaigns, manage advertising spend, and track KPIs such as SaaS Google Ads conversion rates.

Make the Most of Your Google Ads

Google Ads are flexible and scalable, allowing you to tweak your ad campaign so that it generates as many leads as possible for your SaaS business. While there are many directions you can take with Google Ads, here are some proven, practical ways to get the most from your campaigns:

Identify Target Audiences

Segment your target audiences based on data about their demographics, interests, and online behaviors. This information can be used to create ads that resonate with different buyer personas.

Use Targeted Keywords that Align With Intent

Keywords are the keystones to successful digital advertising. Make sure they align with the intent of the ad.

Focus on keywords that address specific needs. These can change at various stages of a consumer’s purchasing journey, so you want to provide solutions and value to different touchpoints of this journey.

Create Memorable Content with an Easy-to-Execute CTA

Speak your audience’s language; be concise and persuasive. Emphasize the unique features and benefits of your product. Test ads before you launch them. Link to landing pages that address specific needs and pain points. Convince viewers to take a desired action, such as enrolling in a loyalty program, making a purchase, etc., with a compelling CTA.

Ad extensions are an additional Google Ads feature you can use to display more information about your company, as well as improve ad visibility and click-through rates (CTRs).

Optimize Landing Pages

This step is critical if you want to convert leads. Tailor landing pages to solve your audience’s problems.

Make sure the page is visually appealing, the content is consistent with the ad that brought them there, and the user can easily figure out what to do (e.g., fill out a form, click a button, etc.). Google Ads also has a Quality Score feature that can assess an ad’s relevance to decrease your cost per click (CPC) and improve results.

Track Everyone’s Ads (Yours and Theirs)

When you use the conversion tracking feature of Google Ads, you gain insights into acquisition and conversion costs so you can identify the most profitable leads and adjust a campaign to optimize your investment. Include KPIs such as CTR, CPC, conversion rates, and cost per lead (CPL). Compare them with industry benchmarks to assess performance throughout an ad’s lifecycle.

Monitor ad campaigns by competitors to discover new ideas. If your product or service is similar, you may be able to bid on their brand terms and names to direct prospects to your site, where you can promote the advantages of your SaaS product over others.

Reconnect With Those Who Did Not Take Action

Reach out to those who did not take action through previous ads. This can be done with a special offer or a series of ads, each telling a different part of your product's story to showcase various features.

Generating Your Future

Google Ads are vital to SaaS business marketing strategies and lead generation. To maximize your return on investment, continuously analyze the performance of your ads and make adjustments to generate leads and help your business grow.

Proven Real Estate Investor Methods to Attract Motivated Sellers by Andrew Steven

Finding an audience that’s motivated is a major part of any business. No one spends their time and money trying to get more window shoppers to come knock on their door.

Methods for attracting motivated sellers in real estate include targeted PPC campaigns, local SEO, intentionally designed landing pages, and audience segmentation. Finding these sellers can be difficult, and simply dumping money into an ad buy isn’t going to cut it.

Google Ads for real estate investors are important, but they’re just one piece of the puzzle, and you need to know how to use them to make them worth your while.

Why Motivated Sellers

When it comes to buying and selling homes, people are often slow to act. A potential client might look at property for more than a year before finally pulling the trigger.

Motivated sellers are a unique kind of lead for a number of reasons. Maybe they’re acting under time-sensitive parameters, such as job relocation, divorce, or foreclosure, or they might be willing to trade price for speed or simplicity.

These details can be beneficial to realtors, but motivated sellers are also a unique challenge in that you ideally need to connect with them before they list their property. Also, your messaging needs to hit different points, namely speed in addition to trustworthiness.

Targeted PPC

Pay per click (PPC) can be an effective tool for connecting motivated sellers to your brand. Here are some ways to get the most out of this investment using focused keywords:

  • Location-specific: Include the name or zip code of the city or neighborhood you work in.

  • Urgency-specific: Think 'cash purchase,' 'fast closing,' or 'sell as-is.' You could also get creative and use keywords like 'inherited.'

Retargeting

Even motivated sellers aren’t likely to sell a property the first time they click on a link that came up with their first search. Large purchases and sales take time for people to commit to, and retargeting can help re-engage potential clients that have already shown they’re interested. You can reach these sellers by:

  • Offering a promotion if a seller closes by a certain date

  • Using language like, “Still need to sell your house fast?”

It’s also worth considering the seller is craving credibility in the agent they choose, so pairing your brand with success stories or displaying your expertise might help bring them back.

A Soft Landing

Once you’ve attracted a motivated seller, how do you get them to follow through? They might want to trust your brand, but they don’t care that you’ve been writing a blog about investment strategy for the last year. The landing page they end up at should give them what they’re looking for, and it should do it simply.

  • Use a straightforward layout.

  • Use copy that mirrors their search query.

  • Provide a prominent lead form asking only for essential information.

Outside of this, you could include some easy-to-digest testimonials or accreditation to help seal the deal, but mostly, you want to stick to the point and help the seller get to the next step.

Audience Segmentation

The next level of targeting potential sellers is capturing your audience’s data and using it to reach the ones you want. This is where you need to be a bit of a detective, because you need to think like your potential clients.

A few details that can signal a seller is motivated are previous searches, like 'how to sell my house fast,' and websites they’ve visited, such as those for listing properties. Google will let you group users together based on details like these, so your ads go where they’re most likely to get results.

What’s Your Motivation?

Motivated sellers may be unique in many ways, but they’re like any other potential client–you want to catch their attention, show them your brand is reputable, and make it easy for them to choose.

Never send paid traffic to a generic homepage, don’t use technical or investor-focused copy, ask for as little information as possible to start the lead-tracking process, be smart about your targeted keywords, and follow up quickly. This can be a lot of work, and it can be daunting when you feel like one misstep means a potential sale falls through the cracks.

Even with all this in place, there’s no replacement for having an expert on your side. Let that expert be BERK Labs! We can help you find motivated sellers and help you land the online real estate leads your business needs.

Top Strategies for Getting Quality Online Real Estate Leads by Andrew Steven

Real estate can be a fiercely competitive field, and though the internet offers endless possibilities, that hasn’t lessened the competition. When it comes to getting an edge online, Google Ads for real estate is just part of the picture.

If you’re looking to generate quality real estate leads online, you need a focused strategy that includes using conversion-optimized landing pages, investing in search campaigns, running targeted ads, building trust through content, and establishing systems for consistent follow-up. With the right approach and the right systems in place, you can generate leads in a way that’s both repeatable and scalable.

Conversion-Optimized Landing Pages

Whether someone is searching for a new pair of socks or a new car, it doesn’t take much for them to walk away from one business and try another. Once you’ve gotten someone to click on an ad, you don’t want the place it takes them to be the last engagement they have with your brand. Here are a few places you can focus to make sure people stick around:

  • Make sure load time is fast.

  • Design your landing page to be mobile-friendly.

  • Match each landing page to the message of the ad that links there.

  • Provide a simple call to action–register, download, or schedule.

Even if you know how to get real estate leads from Google, you don’t want to throw it all away by sending them to a webpage they immediately leave.

Investing in Search Campaigns

One of the first things people do when they think about buying a home is look online. This is why search advertising can be so effective in real estate.

Make sure you pay attention to:

  • Local intent, adding the name of cities, zip codes, neighborhoods, or nearby schools to your keywords

  • Branded keywords, using your name or that of your agency

  • Negative keywords, disregarding searches that use terms like 'license' or ‘class'

Targeted Ads

When it comes to large purchases, it’s common for people to contemplate their decision for a long time. This means clicking links then closing windows repeatedly, perhaps over the course of weeks or months.

To work with this, you should make use of retargeting ads that are served to people who have already engaged with your ads or brand. You can use retargeting to:

  • Promote a free consultation

  • Announce a new listing

  • Show homes a potential customer previously viewed

  • Display reviews or success stories

No one buys the first house they click on, so you need to accept that it’s a long game getting customers to come around.

Systems for Consistent Follow-Up

Just as potential customers can be fast to click away from a website, they can be quick to drop a realtor that isn’t responsive. Always:

  • Send a confirmation message immediately.

  • Provide the opportunity for a further engagement by offering a resource or the opportunity to schedule a meeting.

Some of these messages can be automated to reach out to potential buyers directly, but if you don’t want to take that route, make sure you’re notified anytime you have a lead.

Building Trust Through Content

Paid ads can get you clicks, but there’s no replacement for long-term establishment of credibility. This can only be achieved over time, and potential customers recognize it when they see it. You can produce content around many things, such as:

  • Neighborhood guides to places you have listings

  • Checklists for homebuyers or people putting property on the market

  • Q&A sessions

  • Discussion of the national or global market and what that means for your potential customers

Content like this can be text or video. Find what works for you and be honest with yourself about where your expertise lies.

Use Your Data

One of the most powerful tools you have in online advertising is data, and you should be using it all the time. Track what works, what leads to conversions, and what resonates with which audiences.

Once you’ve done this, adjust everything, put your money where it’s working, and invent new ads that fit what’s connecting. Then, repeat.

Quality Help for Quality Leads

While all the above is important, these are just pieces of the puzzle. What ties it all together is strategy.

BERK Labs can help you invest in the right ads, make sure you improve your landing pages, and help you understand how to generate leads for real estate investors. Reach out today to see what we can do for you!

Maximize Your Real Estate Leads With PPC Google Ads: A Step-By-Step Guide by Andrew Steven

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads can be a powerful tool, no matter what industry you’re in. To get the real estate leads with PPC Google Ads, you need a targeted strategy that uses location-specific keywords, compelling copy, strong landing pages, and ongoing optimization.

Real estate is a unique industry driven by referrals and timing, and paying for search advertising can be a powerful and scalable tool. No matter the size of your operation, PPC can get your services and brand seen by high-intent customers exactly when they need to see it.

The power of Google Ads is that they can be applied both broadly and specifically. Google Ads for real estate agents use the same mechanisms as for other businesses, but need to be optimized differently.

Local Service Ads

Local Service Ads (LSAs) are an alternative to PPC we should discuss before diving in. Google Ads are driven by keywords provided by the businesses. This isn’t the case with LSAs.

For these ads, which appear in Google search results, you simply report the kind of service you offer and where. This means these ads take less work, but because they’re so heavily automated, you aren’t able to control the details that are needed for the most effective campaign.

Keywords Are Key

Intent

As with any business, you want users to engage with your ads and follow through. One of the ways to get this is by focusing your keywords. For starters, you can think about three categories of keywords: high, medium, and low intent.

High Intent

  • Homes for sale in [neighborhood]

  • Condos for sale [zip code]

  • Buy house in [city]

These keywords indicate more interest on the part of the user and try to meet them where they’re at.

Medium Intent

  • Best neighborhood [city]

  • First-time homebuyer [neighborhood]

Medium intent keywords show the potential customer doesn’t yet know where they want to live or what kind of real estate they’re trying to purchase. This level of intent can be helpful to cultivate clients, but often has little conversion.

Low Intent

  • Rent versus buy

  • What is closing cost

Low intent keywords are often used when a person is still researching; they may be years away from a purchase or never even make one. Use this ladder to target clients closer to a purchase and invest more in high intent keywords.

Location

Even people who don’t work in real estate know the expression ‘location, location, location.’ Of course, this applies to prices, availability, and market health, but it also applies to hooking potential clients.

You can vary the specificity of terms you use, but you can use extremely specific keywords to zero in on audiences. Here are three examples of how location keywords can get your ads in front of the right people:

  • Zip codes: Add a zip code to any combination of words in the vein of ‘[zip code] homes for sale.’

  • Neighborhoods: Add a neighborhood name to similar terms, like ‘condos for sale [neighborhood name].’

  • Schools: Find a school near your properties and add it, such as ‘homes near [high school name].’

Too much specificity can narrow your search away from potential buyers, but if you can get your ads in front of high intent searchers and present information on the part of the city they’re shopping in, you can cover a lot of ground that gets them closer to a purchase.

Going Negative

With so much focus on trying to figure out what your audience will be looking for, you can forget that it can be helpful to weed out some searchers by using negative keywords. Negative keywords work by not accidentally catering to an audience who may not be looking for your product but use related words to search for it. For example, if you sell eyeglasses, you can include ‘wine glasses’ as a negative keyword to make sure your ad isn’t served to people looking to stock their kitchen rather than adjust their eyesight.

You can increase your online real estate leads by carefully using negative keywords. For example, it can be helpful to remove educational terms like 'real estate license' or 'real estate classes.'

It can also be helpful to try to focus on the budget you’re targeting by using terms like 'free homes' or 'houses under 50k' as negative keywords. You can also use negative keywords to adjust intent by using terms like 'how to buy a home.'

The Next Step

Now that you know the step-by-step process of using PPC ads in real estate, take your business to the next level with BERK Labs. Reach out to us today to see how we can help you use the above techniques (and more) to get you leads and scale your business!

Running Google Ads for E-Commerce: The Essential Playbook by Andrew Steven

To successfully run Google Ads for e-commerce, you need a strategy that combines continuous testing, optimized feeds, distinct campaigns, and effective conversion tracking. Google Ads can offer businesses a unique blend of broad reach in multiple forms and precise control over budgets and targeting.

However, complexity and specificity have a push and pull with power. To get the most out of your investment, you have to know what you’re doing.

In this article, we’ll look at a practical approach to getting the results you want and how you can accomplish them on your own, as well as ways e-commerce Google Ads management services can take that work off your plate and maximize your investments.

Understanding Google Ads

The first step to making the right investments with Google Ads is understanding the various forms they can take.

  • Shopping ads: These appear as visual product listings in search results and are driven by the data or product feed created by the seller, not by keywords.

  • Search ads: These are text ads that appear in search results.

  • YouTube ads: These video ads have their own levers of control in that they can be skippable or not and can be displayed before, during or after YouTube videos.

  • Discovery ads: These ads are generated using images, logos, and text submitted by the business, and appear on the YouTube homepage and in the Google Discover feed.

  • Display ads: These are the ads most consumers are most familiar with, appearing as visual ads on webpages.

All these options require finesse if you want to maximize their value. Google Shopping ads optimization, for example, can be complex, but completely worth it once you figure out who to target with which product.

A High-Quality Feed

At the start of your e-commerce ad journey, you need a strong foundation, which is your feed. This is the collection of product information that details your product and allows you to group items into categories, which, in turn, allows you more precise control over your campaigns.

Google Shopping uses this feed instead of keywords. Here are some ways to optimize your feed:

  • Complete every available field; the more information, the better.

  • Use clear, keyword-rich product titles.

  • Use high-quality photos that center your product.

  • Include cost, shipping, and availability.

To start, clarity is key. You want would-be customers to take one look at your ad and know what you’re selling and if it fits their needs.

Campaign Structure

One of the important aspects of Google Ads is that you can categorize your products, allowing you to craft specific campaigns with parameters most effective for your goals. The way you categorize and break out products has a high ceiling for complexity, but here are some considerations to start:

  • You can group products based on margins and performance, such as creating a category for your bestsellers.

  • You can group products based on type (if you sell clothes, you can create a category just for running shoes)

  • You can group products based on promotion and seasonality.

You don’t want to market your bestsellers the same way you do your items on clearance, and you can shape those decisions by paying attention to your feed. These decisions should be made using data.

Tracking Conversions

Google Ads is powerful in part because it can both use and provide data. Tracking conversions is one of the key parts to understanding how your business is functioning and how your customers see it. Here are a few conversion events that can be helpful:

  • Purchase: This will communicate direct return on investment (ROI), telling you how well a product sells.

  • Add to cart: This indicates buyer intent and can provide future targets for remarketing.

  • Begin checkout: If you’re seeing interaction that doesn’t end in purchases, you can track this to see where the funnel drop-off point is occurring.

There are other conversion events that you can track, though it’s easy to get inundated with data that you ultimately don’t use. Tracking this information can be helpful, however, and give you a three-dimensional picture of where your business stands and where it needs to go.

Test, Test, Test

Once you have your product feed, your categories, and your conversion tracking in place, you should be able to craft unique and functional campaigns. The work is never done, however, because you should always be testing and adapting.

Experts in the industry, like those at BERK Labs, can help you implement full strategies that are informed by data, and we can help you use that data to change and respond to customer behavior.

Optimizing Google Shopping Ads: Unlock Your Store’s Potential by Andrew Steven

Google Shopping Ads are powerful tools, but they’re just that–tools. When optimized through data, Google Shopping Ads can increase visibility, drive traffic, and grow revenue.

If you run a startup or midsize business, you need to know how to use every advertising tool available, instead of running ads and hoping they work. E-commerce Google ads are just one piece of the puzzle.

Kinds of Google Ads

When most people think of Google Ads, they think of search ads. In reality, there are many kinds of ads offered through Google:

  • Search ads: These are displayed among search results when a potential customer is looking for something adjacent to your product

  • Display ads: These are the visual ads that appear on webpages, sometimes the product of businesses making use of remarketing for e-commerce.

  • Video ads: Before, during, or after, skippable or not, these ads play during YouTube videos.

  • App ads: Only used if you’re selling an app, Google has you designate text, language, and budget, then uses your data to do the rest.

  • Discovery ads: Appearing on the Google Discover feed and YouTube homepage, Google generates these ads using customer intent data and a range of images, logos, and text you submit.

Why Shopping Ads Are Different

First of all, Shopping ads don’t use keywords, they use your product data. This means that when Google generates and serves your ad, it will be to shoppers best paired with that offering. This allows Shopping ads access to more information and lets Google optimize their appearance.

Better Leads

Shopping ads can include price and product information, meaning potential customers save time researching competitors and are immediately closer to pulling the trigger on a purchase.

Better Campaigns

Because you don’t use keywords, you can invest in Shopping ad campaigns based on product groupings you set in your data feed.

Better Visibility

Shopping ads can have prominent placement, and if you have multiple products, they can appear in diverse forms on the same page.

Google Shopping Ad Optimization

Product feed affects how your products appear in Google’s ‘Shopping’ results, so optimizing that is one of the key parts of getting the most out of your ads.

  • Description: Be thorough and clear. Mention core features, benefits of your product, and things that set it apart. Try and do all of this while making the information easy to take in at a glance.

  • Images: Use high-resolution images that focus on the product. Again, you want would-be customers to know what you’re selling and how great it is with one look. Lifestyle photos can be powerful, but make sure that what you’re selling is center stage.

  • Title: Make sure you include name, brand, model, size, and key attributes. Use any and all consumer data to know which keywords shoppers use when searching so you can include those, as well.

  • Categories: Google automatically assigns a category based on your description (another reason to be clear and precise) but you can override that category to benefit your campaign if needed.

Campaign Structure

With your data feed perfected, the next step in optimization is making sure you have a plan for your campaign. Just like you don’t want to dump money in Google Ads and hope for the best, you don’t want to launch a campaign and hope it reaches who it needs to.

You can help your campaign be dynamic in a few ways. For example:

  • You can use smaller budgets to experiment with products that are seasonal or have previously been low-conversion.

  • You can bid aggressively with high-margin bestsellers to find your ceiling.

  • You can group clearance items to put them on their own track with distinct messaging.

As with much of Google Ads, you can choose to automate a large part of this, but getting those few extra percentages out of your investment comes from customization. Thankfully, you don’t have to understand and execute that customization all by yourself.

Optimize More Than Your Ads

When you’re a startup or mid-sized business with limited resources, Google Shopping ads can be a fantastic investment with huge return. Like all things, however, they work best when they’re treated as dynamic systems with multiple facets.

BERK Labs can help you get the most out of your investment–we can help you build smart and responsive Shopping ad strategies that are data-driven. And if you’re starting out, we can show you the basics, like how to run Google Ads for e-commerce. See what we can offer your business today!