Pamela SapioPaid advertising platforms like Google Ads are becoming more and more complex.
As a result, identifying which strategies are working and which are not—both within your individual ad campaigns as well as for your broader marketing strategy—has become an even bigger challenge.
This is especially true for businesses using more than one PPC platform (as most marketing-savvy businesses are doing nowadays) and it may present a significant roadblock when trying to determine an accurate return on your overall advertising spend.
If you are a business owner or a marketing manager running paid ads for your company, or if you handle PPC accounts for your clients, it may be worth watching this short video.
The benefits of looking at the bigger picture
Each week, our Chief Strategist John Moran meets with our team of strategists, specialists, and client managers to answer questions and address any account issues they may be having. These internal training sessions are critical and ensure that our best practices are shared and understood by the entire Solutions 8 team.
In this video, which features a clip from one of those recent training sessions, John works with Client Manager Tim Hordo to determine the best course of action for a client running both Google Ads and Meta Ads. For the latter, they had recently switched to mostly remarketing.
Tim had considered relaunching a Standard Shopping campaign because the client had been running Performance Max in Google Ads. However, a deeper dive into the account revealed that may not be the best course of action.
In a nutshell, while the Meta Ads in-app metrics showed an 81% drop in spend and a 41% increase in revenue (who would mess with those numbers, right?) it didn’t really provide an accurate big-picture view. Instead, cautioned John, it could be a “false positive” resulting from an increase in returning customers and that, eventually, that well would run dry due to the nature of the product.
His advice? “Standard Shopping is not really the answer here,” says John. “It could be, because they’re going to be doing a lot of remarketing on Meta, but I think that their Meta was actually performing better than what they saw; they were just judging it wrong.”
He recommended pushing less hard into Meta Ads remarketing, explaining that half the traffic is just not sustainable, and that the client would just continue to see a slow decay year over year. With both Performance Max (Google Ads) remarketing heavily and Meta Ads remarketing heavily, remarketing is always going to have better ROAS (similar to Brand).
A change in perspective
In this case, John says the question to ask the client is: Do you want high profitability? Or do you want profitability and scalability? If the answer is the second one, he recommends pushing more cold traffic, and to do this he recommends Meta.
He also stresses the importance of understanding the customer base (in this case, preppers) and how that impacts buying behavior. Then, he says, it’s just a matter of testing and watching the top-line performance. To do this, we recommend paying close attention to media efficiency ratio (MER).
At the end of the day, the key is to get your clients thinking differently and to help them understand that they sometimes need to zoom out to see the bigger picture. In-app metrics—ROAS in particular—may look amazing for a little while, says John… until you find yourself out of business.
Be sure to keep an eye on our YouTube channel for more eye-opening videos like these. It’s not every day you get to sit in on a Solutions 8 internal training with the top strategists in the industry!
