I've been managing Google Ads for 7+ years. I've taught and coached a lot of ad managers and was very confident in my ability to explain match types... Until, today when I was prepping for the match types video in my Google Ads Quickstart Program (coming soon), I decided I'd go crazy and pull up Google's support articles on match types to see how they phrased it. It was actually helpful! (If you've used Google Support, you know how shocking this is). It helped me to put into words some things that were a bit ambiguous before (especially how broad match negatives work). Here's the video I created in which I explain the match types and how they work. You may already know most of this, but it may shed some new light on the fundamentals that could help you improve performance in your accounts. Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Hey all, I haven't posted in a bit, so I wanted to drop you some value! I wrote a book that I've been too distracted/unmotivated to publish (mostly because of the editing stage). I've shared it with a few people in the form of a Google Doc and wanted to share it with you so you can get a deeper understanding of my strategy framework. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RPih0jsL-yeA1K8jtG5XTdPMA8bXfMu8__ngb3Yc9JY/ Feel free to drop comments in this post with questions or thoughts about the info in this book and I'll answer everything to the best of my ability! All the best, -Ryan Founder, Ad Master Academy

I'm a huge proponent of a "full-funnel" marketing strategy that targets people who aren't ready to buy yet so they're familiar with you when they're ready to buy and more likely to trust you. However... You have to design a Google Ads strategy that fits the budget and maturity of the company you're advertising, and that takes into account the sophistication of the market you're targeting. Here's what I mean: 1. Budget This is pretty straightforward. The lower the budget, the more you should focus on what is converting. That means fewer campaigns, fewer ad groups, smaller geo-targets, and ESPECIALLY fewer keywords. You also shouldn't waste time or money on keywords or their search terms if they don't have clear buying intent or are not converting (sometimes general searches are the only option, but some convert and others don't). If you're converting at or below your target CPA and get approved for more budget, double down on what's working until you are no longer limited by budget on your non-branded search campaign. Only then should you look into expanding keyword coverage or any other aspect of the account. 2. Maturity Of The Company Not every company is in a great position to capitalize on their Google Ads account. If a client wants more calls but doesn't answer the phone, has a bad answering service, or is slow to follow up, they'll get mad when spending money on ads doesn't help them grow. If a client has a service-based business or a product funnel and can't fulfill their offer at scale, they're not ready for ads (or to spend more on ads). A company grows in maturity when it grows its customer base, hires, trains, develops processes, refines those processes, understands its customers, improves its messaging, improves its offer to align with its target market's primary pain, etc. To simplify, a company is mature enough to scale an ad account when it understands its ideal customer and can consistently serve them well. Immature companies should focus on internal stability over acquisition.

Ever take over a new Google Ads account and struggle to get good performance, only to find they had put really dumb settings in place? I took over an account recently and started to set things up on a Friday. I fixed their conversion tracking issues (always step 1), set up a brand campaign and set up a general search campaign with their top keywords (a cross between volume and buying intent). I had paused every other campaign and left only mine running, so I thought everything would be fine for the weekend. I came back Monday and saw that traffic spiked, which was good. Until I looked at the search terms report... There was a ton of stuff coming from keywords I never added! I checked the target keywords and someone had added a bunch of Broad match keywords, including a one-word, super generic keyword that could have ANY intent! I knew that the owner, the marketing manager, my client (an agency owner), and possibly their sales manager had access to the account, so I went to the change history to see who had "tried to help". Turns out, it was Google! They added 165 BROAD MATCH KEYWORDS to one ad group!!!! The source was "Auto-applied Recommendations", which I never checked because I never turn them on. ALL OF THEM WERE ON!!!! I quickly turned them off and posted on LinkedIn about it, making the offhand commend that I would "add it to my checklist" (I don't have an actual checklist, which is why my dumb brain got into this problem). Someone apparently called my bluff and asked for the checklist, so I had to actually get organized and make one. I thought you might benefit from having it as well. I just went with everything I could think of off the top of my head that I would normally check when taking over a new account (bonus: it can be used to check new accounts after you set them up, as well). Because I created this with you in mind, I made it public and gave you commenting permissions. Please feel free to point out anything I may have missed while my brain was shutting down after a long day of reporting.

If you're working with a non-profit client, they may be eligible to use a Google Grants account. Google Grants accounts seem awesome on the surface: You get $10,000 in ad spend given to you every month... FOR FREE. You don't even set up a billing profile! They're just like "Happy advertising!" However, there are some caveats... For one, you can only use Search ads. That's not so bad, really. The Search Network is where you get most of your conversions (outside of ecommerce accounts) and if you don't have to worry about ad spend up to $10,000/mo, you can cover the bottom of the funnel and still branch out into the middle and even upper-funnel search keywords. But there's another caveat... You can't bid more than $2.00 per keyword. How on earth are you supposed to get any Impression Share, especially top or absolute top, if you can only bid $2, especially when your competitors are spending as much as 2, 4, 10, 20 times that amount per click? Well, the good news is that you can use automated bidding strategies and those have the ability to bypass the $2 bid limit. You do have to give them time, but bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions can be the saving grace that gets you into the top search results for competitive keywords. Give the campaigns a bit of time to learn and it's not uncommon to see CPCs at $18+ per click in a grants account. So the downsides to the account can be severely limiting. You can't use non-search campaign types. You basically HAVE to use automated bidding strategies. It can take longer than usual to train the algorithm. You may have to work a lot harder to get the same amount of traffic and conversions. But the upside is impossible to ignore: $10,000 per month in FREE advertising. It's hard to say no to that. If you've got clients in the not-for-profit space, have them apply for a Grant account here: https://www.google.com/grants/get-started/ You can always run these ads alongside a non-search account that they pay for to get the benefits of Display, Discovery, YouTube, & Performance Max while letting the grant account handle their Search traffic.