Google Ads Academy 2022: Our 8 Takeaways

There’s an African Proverb that says, “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.” Just as animals in the wild have to stay agile, digital marketers have to remain vigilant in an ever-evolving, competitive landscape. Regardless of their size, all businesses must stay abreast of the latest industry trends if they want to continue to stand out among the white noise.

At the center of this digital landscape is the search engine behemoth, Google. Our marketing team recently attended Google Ads Academy 2022, a series of webinars focused on equipping marketers to get the most out of Google advertising. Spread out over a few months, these webinars covered topics like lead generation, growing online sales, driving results with YouTube, value-based Google Ads bidding, privacy-safe measurement, and measuring Google Ads performance. Read on to learn a few of our team’s key takeaways.

What Were Our Webinar Takeaways?

Our marketing team members had a few key insights they gleaned from this series of Google Ads Academy Webinars. These takeaways include the following.

Generate Leads Webinar

1. Caleb

Privacy has become such a relevant issue that 48% of global consumers have stopped buying or using a service from a company due to privacy concerns. This is a great reminder to use best practices as business owners and marketers.

This quote regarding alignment with Google Ads from former Vice-Chair of GE, Beth Comstock, also struck me: “We’re all emotional beings looking for relevance (broad match), context (smart bidding), and connection (Creative).”

2. Emily

I learned the true value of connecting our clients’ CRM with their Google Ads accounts. I also learned there’s a proven growth formula that helps marketers navigate and successfully market to consumers by considering 3 common marketing factors.

1. Creating a seamless online experience for users.
2. Quality and scale.
3. New and existing privacy laws.

3. Zach

Google is driving the efficacy of lead generation via ads with new tools like Performance Max, which is currently in beta testing. It’s a goal-based marketing tool that optimizes your creatives across multiple marketing channels. These new tools Google’s rolling out make marketers’ jobs more efficient and effective.

Google Ads Performance

4. Julie Anne

Assigning values to your contact touchpoints is more important than ever. If you can’t assign an exact value, try creating a ratio system and working from your most easily identified service. In other words, if Service A is worth $100, and Service B is highly-variable but is three times more valuable to the client, use that to assign a value to Service B.

Using a CRM that integrates with Google is a game-changer. If you have customer data, there’s at least one place in Google where it can be used (if not more).

Grow Online Sales

5. Chad

It’s nice to see that Google is constantly evolving its ad offerings to better serve marketers and is willing to provide support and instruction for users to improve and develop their skills. This helps us to better serve our clients.

6. Emily

My biggest takeaway from this webinar was how helpful Google Shopping Ads are to support online and brick-and-mortar stores. Through local inventory ads, brands and businesses can display exactly what they have in stock to nearby shoppers, which helps boost sales, drive customer engagement, and increase brand authority (legitimacy too)!

Value-Based Bidding

7. Zach

Value-based strategies are different from conversion-based strategies because they’re dynamic. In other words, conversion-based bidding treats all conversions equally, but value-based bidding gives conversions dynamic or variable weighted values. The reality is that some conversions are more valuable than others.

Value-based bidding uses machine learning and automation to provide the most valuable ad serve to a consumer at the optimal time.

As the push toward value-based bidding continues, poor Search Ad performance can usually be attributed to these three factors:

1. Privacy issues
2. Lack of automation
3. Issues with first-party data

By automating bidding auctions, using broad match keywords, and using responsive search ads, you can effectively drive up your ad performance. Modern search performance is now heavily influenced by machine learning and automation.

Manual inputs are becoming a practice of the past. If we fail to automate our ads or provide relevant KPIs for machine learning algorithms to focus on, our ads strategy will suffer.

Driving Results with YouTube

8. Bailey

With YouTube discovery ads, 85% of people take a product related action within 24 hours of discovering a new product. By combining YouTube and Search ads, marketers can increase conversion volume by 8% and decrease CPA by 4%. When you combine Discovery and Search ads, you increase your search conversions by as much as 12%.

Google Ads is now offering in-line form submissions in YouTube ads with two types: Higher intent (longer) and More Volume. When running campaigns, the best practice is to run them for at least 28 days before making any major changes.

According to Google, marketers that follow best practices for their video campaigns get as much as 50% higher conversions per dollar along with a 50% higher conversion rate compared to their counterparts.

Get the Most Out of Your Google Advertising

Partnering with a marketing agency like PHOS is one way for your business to get the most out of its Google advertising. As a Google Partner, our team of marketing experts is ready to help you attain your business goals and maintain your search-engine-marketing-edge in an increasingly competitive and ever-changing digital space.