The year 2022, Google Ads announces big and disruptive changes to its ecosystem. The well-known and loved augmented ad formats will soon be phased out. The Google Shopping smart campaign will be absorbed by the new turbo-smart Performance Max format. And automated in-account recommendations will spend the sleep of those who bravely fight cadence every day to reject pushy recommendations.

Big changes in ads

This is the landscape of one of the world’s most popular advertising systems for those who begin their adventure with Google Ads and feel lost and overwhelmed by the amount of changes and information to assimilate. Fortunately, we still have a real impact on the content and purpose of the ads, but it’s worth familiarizing yourself with all the formats in order to be more confident in all the intricacies. Ready?

I’m officially opening one of the most important posts in 2022 on my blog, which I plan to add to on a regular basis. Have I helped you better understand the world of Google Ads? Be sure to share this post on your social media!

Types of Google Ads campaigns

The choices when creating a campaign are following:

• search network campaign – show up in the search engine for specific phrases that your customers may be searching for. Use the keyword panel in Google Ads to discover relevant words

• Performance Max campaign – a new type of campaign that combines all display&video&shopping formats. Not much can be set manually, most of it is optimized automatically using the ad feed based on our products (in case of e-commerce)

• display network campaign – graphic or video advertisement displayed on websites or in applications

• shopping campaign (Google Shopping) – allows you to display your products above the Google search results and in other places. Note: Smart Shopping and Local campaigns have upgraded to Performance Max.

• video campaign (YouTube) – video format placed on the YouTube platform and on smart TVs
• app promoting campaign – increases the number of downloads of the mobile application (Android and IOS) or activities in the application
• smart campaign – the most automated ad format, combining many different types of campaigns; extremely limited possibility of configuration and custom settings, discouraged during the first tests of ads in Google Ads
• local campaign – if your account is connected to Google My Business, you can advertise stationary stores using Google Ads
• discovery campaign – scrolling full-screen ad displayed, for example, in the “Discover” section of Google search on a mobile phone

Where to start when choosing the type of Google Ads campaign?

We start every Google Ads campaign with an almost sacred question for marketers and senior managers: what is the goal? What will be the return on this campaign? What success metrics do we have?

If this question were asked in a room full of SEO professionals, there would surely be a choral response of “it depends” (hopefully no seo-wielders would feel offended). Let’s walk through together the most popular success metrics for each type of campaign (KPI).

Sample KPIs

• CPC – cost per click is an important metric for search network campaigns and website traffic goals. Cost is made up of many factors, including but not limited to: competition, rate, quality of landing page, relevance of landing page, number of searches, and popularity of a given phrase

• CTR – click-through rate is a good metric for display (ekhem, ekhem) campaigns. I absolutely don’t want to diminish the role of this metric, however, it is… heavily manipulated. I would like to draw your attention to such terms in banner campaigns as “wrong clicks”, “fraud” or the ratio of impressions to clicks (e.g. 1000000 impressions and… 10 clicks). Conclusions colored to sensitize marketers to this metric

• Conversions – purchase, add to cart, subscribe to newsletter, download e-book – you name it. The most important rule of thumb is to configure conversions in your Google Ads dashboard to take into account the relevant action on the page. The daughter metrics for conversions are, of course, conversion rate and cost per conversion. You should also take into account the conversion window and attribution, which do not always show the conversions from a given month

• Cost – absolutely the most important thing that every vigilant marketer checks at the very beginning of campaign analysis. Is the daily budget being spent? Do per-click rates have the potential to go down? Does an increase in budget translate into more clicks/conversions? And most importantly – Google Ads, unfortunately, has the right to spend more than the daily budget (theoretically, on a monthly basis it goes back up)

To sum up

The type of campaign is closely related to what you want to achieve. Additionally, I stress that not every business type will work for all campaigns. It is wise to plan strategies according to the type of business and the goal.

What is important – if you are not comfortable with advanced strategies and developed account structures, because you are taking your first steps in Google Ads, it is not worth getting discouraged and completely abandoning your efforts. The saddest conclusion is that for the Google Ads system there is no competition with similar potential, hence our presence in this advertising panel is almost mandatory.

I recommend to start with small steps method, from the simplest actions and test, test and test absolutely every relevant functionality. Good luck with your actions and see you in the next post!
Do you like my entry and want to support me? Check also my post about Google Analytics.
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