Let's burst some bubbles. I'm gonna give you the quick and dirty truth about every campaign type inside of Google Ads. This is all the stuff that nobody wants to talk about, but everybody who runs Google knows is true. Foist, foremost, search. So expensive, but so effective. Here's the thing about search. You're at the extreme bottom of the funnel. I want to buy your widget right now. Today everybody wants to bid on that traffic. This is people raising their hand. By the way, everybody wants to bid on that traffic. The best analogy I have is you're suiting up throwing on some armor, grabbing some weapons, and you're going into the call to see 'em, and you're going head to head with all your competitors. Wham, pow, smack, pow if you can't compete, you can't compete. And by the way, having the best product doesn't mean that you can compete. My favorite example is Salesforce. Salesforce is banking on a 25 year ltv, 25 year retention. That means that. Even if they have an inferior product, they're gonna be able to give more, offer more, do more, spend more than any newbie in the space, right? You have to be VC backed before you can compete with that. The example I use often too is life insurance If you're selling nothing but life insurance, you're making like, I forget what those guys make. God bless 'em. It's like a hundred dollars on the policy for the life of the policy. Insurance companies are willing to spend. More than they make on a life insurance policy because they know they'll get you for a bunch of other policies. So if you just sell life insurance, you can't compete inside of search. This is where all the competition goes. And so you have to do a viability study. Make sure that you can be viable inside of search now, because it's to the bottom of the funnel. The way to answer this is to lift yourself outta the bottom and move towards the middle of the top by providing valuable content. But you, what you're doing is you're trading time for money. That's time for money. So the bottom of the funnel spend lots of money, takes very little time. As you move up the funnel, you spend way less money, but it takes way more time. Dynamic search ads, dsa, now this is still search but the thing that I like about DSA is Google is determining your placements for you based off of the content on your page, and you end up with little pockets of traffic that A, you wouldn't have gotten before. And B, are. Generally uncontested. where search is really expensive, in most instances DSA ends up being less so because you're letting Google sell you traffic that Google thinks is viable but isn't necessarily quite as contentious now. Does it always work? No. The thing that really helps with DSA is if you have a content rich website go build out the content on your website before you run dsa. This is true for e-comm and lead generation. Make sure that you've offered as much information as you possibly can that Google can draw upon and use. Because if you give Google that, then it's gonna use it. If you don't have that, then DSA is gonna die on the vine display. I've never made outbound display work ever. I've seen it work. I've actually been given campaigns by clients who've made it work elsewhere, and then we took it over. know, a lot of that might just be the type of client that we attract too. Like we're not doing Fortune 100 companies, we're doing smaller businesses, and display is this massive ecosystem. The Google Display network reaches 90% of all internet users on the planet, and Google doesn't allow for the type of segmentation that would make display. As functional as Facebook out of the gate. It has that segmentation, but it doesn't allow for that for a bunch of reasons that actually make a lot of sense. The short version is they don't wanna get sued and they don't want a congressional hearing. Outbound display is a really tough nut to crack. You need to have conversion tracking that is absolutely rock solid, including the ability to tell Google what's happening after the click if you're doing lead gen. So how much a prospect is worth, preferably from an LTV perspective you need to spend an immense amount of money. We're talking a hundred thousand dollars a month is the beginning, and you need to just let it run and optimize itself. the client that we saw really make display work. They were in the financial services industry and they spent like, 80 grand a month for nine months or something. Now they hemorrhaged that money, but at the end, their cost per lead was insanity. It was like so dialed in. it was truly unbelievable. I was just blown away by it. So display can work, but you need a great big, spend. A lot of patience and a thick spine video. Be very careful with video. Video doesn't mean YouTube. Video means whatever video, whatever Google decides video means. Google's video placements are very liberal and I don't love Google's video partners, to be honest with you. I don't like the way that video can manifest with Google's expanded placements. So when I run video ads, I purely stick to YouTube. Now, it's been some time since we've tested this, so if you've cracked the code on, other Google's more liberal placements, let me know. I know in some instances you actually can't restrict, which sucks. I learned that live on a podcast with Al Keck. It was really embarrassing. I was like, you know, Al Rick, we, generally don't do this and then Alex goes, actually, you can't anymore. They took that option away from me last year and I was like, wow. Shows what I know. Would be really interested in somebody who's running video campaigns outside of YouTube and is successful. So if that's you, hit me in the comments. But otherwise I stick entirely to YouTube. Cause that's where I see the quality video traffic shopping. Standard shopping is making a comeback. With a vengeance. Pmax was, the Blue Ocean. We were the Performance Max agency. It was crushing life, kicking ass, kicking names, and then everybody went to it. And interestingly, now we've shifted back to standard shopping and It's amazing, man. When the pendulum swings, it's amazing how successful you can be if you just swing in the opposite way. The pendulum swings to the right. I swing to the left, pendulum swings to the left. I swing back to the right. And the other thing that's really interesting is now that we're some of the bigger educators in the space, it makes you wonder how much of that pen, pendulum swing we're responsible for. You know, we brought people to Performance Max, which ruined performance Max. So we're going back to standard shopping now. People are gonna go back to standard shopping and then we're, you know what I mean? Like, it's just an interesting philosophical problem. it's self-imposed. That said, standard shopping is, this is where the actual shopping feed. In order to be successful with standard shopping, you have to have. Phenomenally well optimized feeds. You also don't wanna sleep on G T I N codes, G T I N codes. It's the unique identifier for every product, and it's what Google uses in order to optimize against. So you can change things like titles, descriptions, images, and Google still knows that you're talking about the same product. So Google shopping's great for e-comm but you're gonna need a lot of media, especially lifestyle images. if I'm buying a dress, I dunno why I'd be buying a dress. I just came out. Might need to examine myself a little bit. If I'm buying a dress and all I see is a dress that's sterile, there's nothing I'm gonna connect to. But if I see a person in that dress now there's empathy there. And so lifestyle images are phenomenally important. And with ai, mid journey, man, you can put anybody in any dress, you can come up with a whole host of avatars, offer mid journey, the product that you want to populate and then have it create those images for you. There's no excuse not to have it. Now. Performance max AI driven advertising. Google likes to sell your own traffic back at you. So a lot of remarketing, lot of brand very unwieldy, hard to manage. It's interstellar space. Travel, the speed of light. So you're like, Hey, let's try Zoom. And then Google's like, we're there and you're like, this isn't where I wanted to go. But now you're 4 billion light years away. There's a ton of junk traffic inside of Performance Maxs, especially for lead generation, that you have to be careful of. There's ways to fix that, but it's still a problem. One of the best ways is what we call a cost flag trap. I didn't name that by the way the team at tier 11 did. But you create a conversion event that would be the default conversion event and leads to. Conversion that you're not tracking. So for example, you have like asking for lead gen. You're asking somebody to fill out a form and the default option of the first form field, like the dropdown, is an option that no real lead would ever select. Well, the bots and the click farm select that because they lead the defaults in place, generally speaking, and they go off to dead lead land and they don't get tracked. That's one way of many to protect yourself from this spam traffic problem. But that's not even the biggest problem in performance Max. Performance Max is. it over-indexes to where Google wants to sell inventory instead of necessarily where the most valuable inventory is. The way to, prevent that is to run campaigns in the channels that you wanna make sure Google Will push Performance Max. So if you want Performance Max to go into the shopping feed, then you have to run a standard shopping campaign. So Performance Max will go and steal from that standard shopping campaign. I know that's massively counterintuitive. It's so weird. Like Performance Max will not go into shopping until I run a shopping campaign. Then Performance Max goes into shopping. So my shopping campaign looks like it's not performing, but it's there as a leash kind of, so I can pull Performance Maxs in that way. When it succeeds, it does so spectacularly. When it fails, it does so spectacularly. So be careful with Pmax at a certain point it's all we're gonna have left. Like Google's, slowly just, that's killing by the way. It's like knocking down campaigns, taking 'em away from US app campaigns. I don't run these, for whatever reason, I haven't gotten these customers. I also think they're probably just easier. I. I don't think people need to hire an agency to run an app campaign. If you got a mobile app, go run an app campaign. Super linear, very easy to set up. And neither do they work or they don't. Conversion tracking is one of the easiest points of conversion in the whole Google Ads ecosystem. So I don't even know if I would tell people to run, the only time we've ever run app campaigns is if they've been part of a larger, there's somebody has a. Whatever it is. we ran one for an LMS company that also had an app. So we're trying to sell the courses in the lms and then the app download was just one of many, but if it's pure on app, man, don't hire an agency. You don't need them. There's 15 settings. Local campaigns, they usually used to be real. We used to actually have local campaigns and then Google killed local for performance max and they're garbage right now, but hopefully they get better. Local campaigns used to crush, man, they were so good. And you know, now Google's trying to put everything into one bottle, and it sucks because it hurt the, the businesses that were the most at risk. And now Performance Max as a local campaign, it just goes haywire. It massively overreaches in so many ways. I've told our smaller clients not to run it just don't discovery campaigns I love discovery because this is where you can really go to Massively explode the top of the funnel. Google does a good job at putting your product or service in front of people that would potentially be interested in your product or service. They do a great job at that. However, you need a budget. You need a budget in order to run discovery campaigns cuz they take time to build awareness. that's not because the advertising mechanism takes time. That's because awareness takes time, right? Like people getting acclimated to a narrative that takes time. And then local service ads. These are the Google guaranteed ads that you see at the top. When you search for specific industries, I've never run these. I think they work really well based on what I've heard. I'd love to know what y'all think. I don't think there's anything to set up or optimize. It's like thumbtack. You go in, you tell Google like 10 pieces of information and then Google. Places you're at. So don't need an agency for this either. it's interesting how many of these account types you don't need agencies for. I'm gonna start polishing my resume. That's it. What did I miss? What do you do? How do you do it? Tell me. I'd love to know. Thanks for watching. I'll see you tomorrow.