Google Ads and Growth Marketing - CXL Course Review

As part of the series of articles reviewing the Growth Marketing Minidegree by CXL, today we are going to delve deeper into Google Ads.

This course is found in the "Channel Specific Growth Skills" section, following the course about Facebook Ads. It is taught by Johnathan Dane and has a different approach from his predecessor. Whereas Curt Maly presents a solid methodology on how to succeed on Facebook, Johnathan has a more superficial and direct approach to Google Ads.

Measuring what matters

The first lessons from the training cover a concept alignment of what is a result for a company when advertising on Google. Johnathan claims that above CPC and other metrics paid media managers should aim to deliver results on the business level. That is, a low CPC doesn't necessarily mean that you are generating profit, that your company has a good ROI.

He advises to take into consideration the conversion rates of your campaign alongside other micro metrics and then connect everything with the ROI - considering also the internal costs of the company. He cleverly provides an ROI calculator that makes it easy to come up with the goals of CPC, investment, and conversions, considering the cost structure from the company.

Additionally, Johnathan alerts about the "Iceberg Effect". It is a negative outcome that happens when you layer too many different targeting options within your ad group. When it happens, you cannot be sure about the effect of each one of the targeting options, so that you can't tell what is working and what is not. Thus, it is important to use as few as possible targeting options for each ad, creating specific campaigns to have control of what is going on.

Research and Conquer

The trainer goes on to demonstrate how to use native and external tools to research before starting your campaigns. He briefly shows how to use the Google Ads' Keyword Planner and demonstrates that you can also use SEMRush and SpyFu to get insights about new keywords to target. He suggests the use of Reddit, Pinterest, and Wikipedia on top of your competitor's website.

Something new for me was the use of Moat and What Runs Where, two tools to spy how competitors use display advertising. Although SEMRush has a feature that covers this topic, it seems that these two tools can widely help to explore new angles on competitor analysis.

Ads' temperature: adapt to thrive

The next section of the course is all about understanding how the audience is prone to convert and how to adapt your ads to each case.

He states that we should consider four pillars of the search advertisement: brand, competitor, generic and informational searches. And, besides, consider that you have a hot audience, prepared to convert and a cold audience, unaware of your brand. Therefore, the challenge is to match these two variables with your message and offer to fit your audience.

Considering the alignment between the level of interest of the audience, the offer, the message, and call to action is especially important for display ads. Already considered a low-converting channel, the display is one of the most affected ad options, since target people that aren't searching for your solutions can often ignore your banners if the message is not tailored to their needs.

Building up the campaigns

Following the training, the teacher demonstrates how to set up search and display campaigns from scratch. The approach is very straight forward and covers the basics to start. Here, the Google Ads' course from Google itself is much better.

Optimizing - a routine to success

Unlike the previous section, this one brings very good new practices that expand the core activities a beginner marketer could do. The first thing Johnathan suggests is to start working with filters and rules to deeply understand the results of your campaigns.

He gives plenty of examples and some case studies to illustrate how powerful your analysis becomes when supported by the correct filters. Besides, he presents a tool named KITE, which assess your campaign's performance in terms of best practices. The teacher of this course states that Google's suggestions for improvements just cover what benefits the platform, but doesn't consider how you could achieve lower CPCs and higher ROIs.

When it comes to optimization, Johnathan suggests a weekly and a monthly routine. Weekly, you would like to check:

1. Ad testing - can you create new versions to split test your ads? Is there any room to modify how the current ones are performing in terms of copy and design?
2. Bid adjustments - check whether you want to bid higher to acquire a bigger share of impressions, with ad groups that are with good performance. Check whether you want to bid lower to ad groups that you have a competitive disadvantage;
3. Negative Keywords - check the search terms for each of your keywords and assess whether you want to negative keywords or create new ads targeting high-performance search terms that aren't covered yet.
4. Keyword expansion - check your scale and each keyword performance to assess whether you want to target broader terms or include new ones;
5. Automatic placements - as you have for search terms, you can assess the places your display and video campaigns are shown. You could find some places to remove if inappropriate or to focus on high-performance websites and YouTube channels.

As it relates to monthly (or even quarterly) analysis, the trainer suggests an in-depth analysis that covers device performances across the campaigns, advanced geographical settings, and also attribution overview to ensure that your overall attribution model is aligned with your Google Ads set up.

Final Thoughts

When you have such a good experience with a course, as it was with the Facebook Ads one, you tend to raise the bar and expect high-quality content for everything. Unfortunately, this course is much more simple than his predecessor.

As a paid media specialist, it is also inevitable to compare the course content to others in the market, especially the Brazilian ones. While most of the content we have in the country is focused on ad groups, copy, and keywords, the CXL version presents a simples overall view but contributes a lot towards optimization.

I'd like to see a more in-depth approach, with slide decks, longer lessons, and a more structured content, as available in the Facebook Ads class.