I had an unlimited budget.
I could spend as much money as I wanted on whatever ads I wanted.
But I had to be profitable.
I was working in-house for a technology company.
We had aggressive revenue targets and I wanted to play a major part in making that happen.
I crushed our revenue targets.
Heres what I learned.
A good creative trumps everything else.
A good creative will get you tons of clicks.
The key to this step is to always test new creatives and find what works best for your company.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
If youre struggling to create your own creative, draw inspiration from other industries.
Those highly competitive industries breed insane amounts of innovation because failure to innovate means falling behind the competition.
People want to see something new, and your brand new ad is only new for a day.
The house always wins
Ive sat through countless demos for all the major bid management platforms.
Their entire job is convincing marketers their systems can outperform Google.
Technically true, but if youre not using Target CPA, then youre leaving conversions on the table.
Every third-party solution can only optimize at the keyword level.
Its a limitation Google has built into the ecosystem; they have an inherent edge.
Suppose a user is searching for new windows for their house.
Your keyword is home windows.
That keyword is what bid management tools will train their algorithms against.
Theyll have you download a years worth of keyword performance data to train their systems.
Those are two very different searches.
Google knows this; bid management systems dont.
I tried out one of those major bidding platforms in a head-to-head test against Target CPA.
We split our campaigns in a fair way, each had about half our budget and similar campaign types.
The bidding platform didnt even come close to Googles performance on a broad match.
They were pathetically bad in comparison.
So bad that we started pulling campaigns back to Google after a few weeks.
They were better in Bing Ads, though, for what its worth.
YouTube is still a hidden gem
Creating YouTube ads is hard.
You need experience making videos, complex software with a steep learning curve, and more assets.
You also need audio, video, b-roll, animations.
The difficulty and cost associated with creating video ads are exactly why YouTube is still a hidden gem.
YouTube is also great for conquesting your competitors.
I get those clicks for less than $4 on Youtube.
The trick is using a custom intent audience for each of my competitors keywords.
It targets people on Youtube who searched those keywords in Google in the last seven days.
I can show highly targeted, relevant Youtube ads to those people at 1/5th the cost of search ads.
Why wouldnt I put a budget toward that?
That level of incrementally can make or break your revenue targets.
Think about the user.
Email is a very personal space that youre intruding on.
If youre having trouble succeeding with Gmail ads, your creative is busted.
Succeeding in digital marketing is all about iteration.
No strategy works forever and failing to consistently test is a recipe for failure.
Embrace machine learning and automated bid strategies, especially Googles Target CPA.
you’re able to read the original articlehere.
