Sitelinks are additional links shown beneath your Google Ad that take users to specific pages on your site. Common examples include “Contact Us,” “Pricing,” “Free Trial,” “Customer Reviews,” and “Locations.” Each sitelink can include up to 25 characters of link text and two 35-character description lines.

Sitelinks give shoppers more paths into your site — but none of it matters if you can’t measure what happens after the click. Make sure your google ads conversion tracking is set up correctly before you optimize which sitelinks convert best.

I’ve noticed that well-structured sitelink examples can significantly boost ad performance. They guide users to the most relevant pages, make navigation easier, and increase engagement with your site.

Sitelinks in Google Ads allow you to add extra links beneath your main ad. Use them to direct users to specific product or service pages. For example, this can increase your CTR (Click-Through Rate) by 10-15% if the links match user intent.

What’s a benefit of using the sitelink extension? Many advertisers overlook enhanced sitelinks, but they are a secret weapon—adding descriptions to sitelinks makes ads take up more space in search results, leading to a noticeable increase in CTR.

In the previous post, you learned 20 ad copy strategies to put your Click Through Rates (CTR) ahead of your competition. Today, we’re going to kick it up a notch with ad extensions.

As of 2025, Google Ads started including ad extensions into their Quality Score algorithm. What does this mean for advertisers? Missing out on the CTR and quality score boosting benefits of ad extensions is putting you at a major disadvantage.

So what’s the ad extension you should always be running?

This article contains:

Overview of Google Ads Assets

Alright, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of ad extensions, a game-changer in the world of Google Ads.

While analyzing different campaigns, I found that Google Ads sitelinks examples perform best for branded queries, often increasing CTR by 20-30% when linking to high-interest pages rather than generic sections like “About Us” or “Contact.”

Google ads sitelink improves visibility and increases the CTR of an ad.

What are sitelink extensions is a common query among advertisers looking to enhance their ads.

Using ad extensions effectively can significantly boost your ad performance, making your ads not just visible but irresistible.

Some sitelink examples include links to promotional pages, services, or contact forms that make it easier for your audience to engage without navigating through multiple steps.

What are sitelinks in Google Ads?

Sitelinks in Google Ads help improve ad visibility by providing additional clickable links beneath the main ad text.When running Google Ads, understanding what sitelinks are is crucial to maximizing ad visibility and performance.

A sitelink extension allows advertisers to add extra links beneath their main ad, directing users to specific pages on a website. But what is a sitelink in Google Ads, really?

It’s more than just extra real estate—sitelink extensions, when used properly, can significantly increase CTR. Many advertisers ask how many sitelinks you can have; Google typically shows up to four, though you can add more.

Looking for sitelink extension examples or site links examples can be helpful for inspiration. If you’re still unsure, just search for Google sitelinks example or Google Ads sitelink extensions examples—seeing them in action clarifies their impact. 

A common question is how many sitelinks can you have, and while Google allows up to eight, not all of them will always appear—only the most relevant ones get displayed.

When you set up sitelinks in Google Ads, you give your audience direct access to specific parts of your website, improving user experience and potentially increasing your ad’s click-through rate.

We tested a new site link extension example across three ad groups — CTR increased by 10%.

After adding sitelink descriptions, we observed stronger engagement, particularly on mobile devices. Sitelinks are 2-4 additional links you can include in your ad.

Sitelinks quick tips: add Google Ads sitelinks keywords to make your ads more relevant.

• Google Ads sitelinks need to lead to a different page other than your destination URL. If you are sending visitors to your homepage, then your sitelinks cannot also lead to your homepage.
• Sitelinks don’t appear all the time. Don’t continually search your ads to see if they are live on Google.com. Instead, use the ad preview tool. Typically, sitelinks appear in the top 1-3 positions.
• Sitelinks work best when you consider other pages that are important to your customers. Think about what else may be helpful to a customer when making a particular search. Consider the buying funnel and search marketing. What else will be relevant to a user? 
• If someone is searching for “rent a car new LAX”, perhaps your primary link goes to your rentals page, but your sitelink leads to a page describing your famous 15 minute check in / checkout. Another sitelink is dedicated towards luxury rentals, helping those interested in luxury head directly to the page that is most relevant to them. Another sitelink may lead to your contact page, to help users interested in calling your store.

When creating sitelinks, always add the optional description lines. I’m still surprised when I see advertisers skipping over this simple step to more clicks.

Sitelinks without the description lines still add a CTR boost. See this example by Amazon, which most likely has a higher CTR for having sitelinks, but can go the extra step by adding description lines to their sitelinks.

When advertisers take the time to create sitelinks with other pages helpful to users, and add the extra description lines, the impact is significant.

Sitelink Examples

Here's what well-written sitelink assets look like in practice, staying inside the 25/35/35 character limits above:

Industry	Sitelink Text	Description Line 1	Description Line 2
E-commerce	Shop New Arrivals	Free shipping over $50	New styles added weekly
SaaS	See Pricing Plans	Plans start at $29/mo	No credit card required
Local Service	Book a Free Quote	Same-day estimates available	Licensed & insured team
B2B	Talk to Our Team	Get a response within 24 hrs	Trusted by 500+ companies

What is sitelink text?

It’s the descriptive text that accompanies your sitelink, helping users understand what they will find when clicking the link.

Crafting the right sitelink text is a game changer—using generic labels like “Learn More” is a missed opportunity, while adding curiosity-driven phrases can double the click rate.

When creating sitelink text, ensure it clearly describes the page’s content, making it easier for users to decide whether to click the link.

When writing sitelink text, be concise yet descriptive. Each sitelink text should clearly communicate what users will find on that page. Instead of generic terms like “Click Here,” use specific phrases like “Luxury Car Rentals” or “Quick Checkout.” This specificity not only improves the user experience but also aligns better with user intent, leading to higher engagement.

Sitelink descriptions are short snippets of text that accompany your sitelinks, providing users with more context about what each link offers.

Adding description lines to your sitelinks is an often-overlooked step that can significantly boost their effectiveness. These lines provide additional context and details about the sitelink, making them more compelling.

For instance, if your sitelink text is “Special Offers,” the description line could be “Save up to 30% on weekend rentals.” 

Let’s take a closer look at an example to illustrate this. Suppose you manage a car rental service. Your main ad is focused on promoting weekend rental discounts.

Here’s how your sitelinks might look:

1. Sitelink Text: Customer Support

2. Description Line: 24/7 assistance for all your rental needs.

3. Destination URL: example.com/customer-support

In this setup, each sitelink provides clear value and directs users to a specific page relevant to their needs.

Google Ads Sitelink Character Limits (2026)

Element	Character Limit
Sitelink link text	25 characters (12 for CJK languages)
Description line 1	35 characters
Description line 2	35 characters

Description lines must be added as a pair — either both or neither. Spaces and punctuation count toward every limit.

Key Types of Google Ads Assets and How They Work

Callout Assets

Callout extensions are your chance to brag a little. You can add snippets of text to highlight your business’s unique features, like “Free Shipping” or “24/7 Support.” 

Because they aren’t clickable, they serve as the perfect spot for your “always-on” benefits that don’t necessarily need their own landing page. By stacking multiple callouts, you create a wall of trust and value that surrounds your main message. They are short, punchy, and designed to give hesitant shoppers that final nudge to choose you over a competitor.

Examples of Callout Assets:

• E-commerce: Free Delivery Over $50 • 30-Day Money Back • No Hidden Fees • Eco-Friendly Packaging

• Service Business: Family Owned & Operated • Fully Insured • Free On-Site Estimates • Same-Day Service

• SaaS/Software: No Credit Card Required • Cancel Anytime • 99.9% Uptime Guarantee • 24/7 Live Chat

• Education: Flexible Schedules • Certified Instructors • Lifetime Access • Job Placement Support

Structured Snippets

Structured snippets give users more context about your products or services. Think of it as a quick list of what you offer under specific categories, like types of services or key features. Unlike callouts, which are for general benefits, structured snippets must follow a specific header like “Brands,” “Styles,” or “Types.” This helps organize your offerings into a readable format that answers the user’s “What exactly do they have?” question before they even visit your site.

Examples of Structured Snippets:

• Types: Mountain Bikes, Road Bikes, Hybrid Bikes, Electric Bikes

• Service catalog: Oil Change, Brake Repair, Tire Alignment, Engine Diagnostics

• Brands: Nike, Adidas, Puma, Reebok, Under Armour

• Courses: Digital Marketing, Graphic Design, Data Science, UX Design

How many sitelinks can you have depends on the device, with up to four on desktop and two on mobile. Sitelinks are additional links in your ad that take people to specific pages on your website, like your store hours or a specific product page. This added detail helps potential customers understand exactly what they can expect from you and gives them more “real estate” to click on, which significantly boosts your CTR.

Examples of Sitelink Assets:

• E-commerce: Men’s Collection • Women’s Sale • New Arrivals • Contact Us

• SaaS: Pricing Plans • Book a Demo • Case Studies • Free Trial

• Local Service: Emergency Repair • Request a Quote • Our Gallery • Meet the Team

• Education: Enroll Now • Course Catalog • Financial Aid • Student Login

Call Assets

Call extensions put your phone number right in the ad, making it super easy for users to call you directly. This is especially useful for mobile users who can just tap and call, leading to immediate customer interaction and potential sales.

Location Assets

If you’ve got a physical storefront, location extensions are a must. These show your address and a map, helping local customers find you. It’s like putting a pin on the map for everyone to see, which can drive more foot traffic to your business.

This extension also pulls in key details from your Google Business Profile, such as your operating hours and phone number. On mobile, it even adds a “Call” button and a “Directions” link, making it incredibly easy for someone to navigate straight to your door. By showing users exactly how close you are—often displaying the specific distance in miles or kilometers—you remove the guesswork and capture “near me” search intent in real-time.

Examples of Location Assets:

• Retail: 123 Fashion Ave, New York, NY • Open until 9:00 PM

• Restaurant: 456 Tasty Blvd, Chicago, IL • 0.2 miles away

• Service: 789 Repair St, London • Directions • (555) 010-9988

• Affiliate: Available at Best Buy • 1.5 miles away (for brands sold in retail chains)

Price Assets

Price extensions display your products or services along with their prices. This is great for setting expectations right from the search results. Users can see what you offer and how much it costs, which can attract those looking for specific deals.

By showcasing your pricing upfront, you qualify your traffic before the click even happens. If a user is looking for a budget-friendly option and sees your premium price, they might not click, which saves you money on unqualified leads. On the flip side, transparent pricing builds immediate trust. These extensions appear as a set of interactive cards that users can swipe through on mobile or see in a list on desktop, each leading to a specific page on your site.

Examples of Price Assets:

• Software: Basic Plan — $19.99/mo • Pro Plan — $49.99/mo • Enterprise — From $99.99/mo

• Hair Salon: Women’s Haircut — From $45.00 • Hair Coloring — From $80.00 • Styling — $30.00

• Hotel: Standard Room — $120/night • Deluxe Suite — $250/night • Family Room — $180/night

• E-commerce: Cotton T-Shirts — $15.00 • Denim Jeans — $40.00 • Hoodies — From $35.00

App Assets

Got an app? App extensions let you promote it directly in your ad. Users can download your app right from the search results, increasing your app installs and engagement.

 

This asset is unique because it provides a dual-purpose experience: users can click your ad’s headline to visit your website or click the app link to go directly to the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. This flexibility ensures you don’t lose potential web traffic while still offering a “fast track” for mobile-first users. It’s particularly effective for businesses where the app offers a better user experience, such as food delivery, travel booking, or fitness tracking.

 

Examples of App Assets:

• Food Delivery: Get 20% off your first order — Download the TastyApp

• Fitness: Track your runs for free — Install the MoveMore App

• Travel: Book flights on the go — Get our app on the App Store

• Finance: Manage your budget easily — Available on Google Play

If your only goal is driving app installs, you might want to look into App Campaigns. But if you want to give users a choice between your site and your app, this extension is the way to go.

Promotion Assets

Promotion extensions are perfect for highlighting special sales or limited-time offers. They make your ad stand out by showing off discounts and deals, encouraging users to click and take advantage of the savings.

These extensions appear with a distinctive price tag icon, which visually separates your ad from the rest of the text on the page. You can schedule them to run during specific dates—like Black Friday or a Back-to-School season—ensuring your seasonal offers are front and center without you having to rewrite your main ad copy. It’s a high-impact way to drive urgency and attract price-sensitive shoppers.

Examples of Promotion Assets:

• Holiday Sale: $20 off orders over $100 • Code: HOLIDAY20 • Ends Dec 24

• Percentage Discount: 30% off all winter gear • Winter Clearance

• Back to School: 15% off laptops for students • Valid through Sept 1

• Flash Sale: Buy 1 Get 1 Free • Spring Collection • Limited time only

How to Create Effective Sitelinks?

Ad sitelinks allow you to showcase more than just a single landing page, giving users more paths to navigate through your website directly from the search result page.

Crafting effective sitelinks begins with selecting the right pages on your site. Each sitelink should lead to a different page that complements the main destination URL.

Ensure each Sitelink in your Google Ads is relevant to the user’s search intent, as this increases the chances of them clicking on it.

Avoid redundancy; if your main ad points to your homepage, your sitelinks should guide users to more specific, yet related pages.

For example, if you run a car rental service and your main ad directs to your general rentals page, your sitelinks could lead to pages about luxury rentals, special deals, rental policies, and a quick checkout feature.

How To Add a Sitelinks in Google Ads

Sitelinks now live under Assets, not the old "Extensions" tab. Here's the current path:

1. Open your campaign (or go to the account level to apply sitelinks broadly) and click Ads & assets in the left-hand navigation.
2. Select Assets, then click the + button and choose Sitelink.
3. Enter your sitelink text (up to 25 characters) and the destination URL.
4. Optionally add two description lines (35 characters each) — remember, it's both or neither.
5. Choose whether the sitelink applies at the account, campaign, or ad group level.
6. Save, then repeat to add at least 4-6 sitelinks — Google recommends a range for enhanced sitelinks to trigger consistently.

The Google Ads Asset You Must Run

While there are many ad extensions, which we’ll cover in our Google Ads Help Series, there is one ad extension you should always be running for your business.

• Enhanced Sitelinks (aka Sitelinks)

Enhanced Sitelinks for Google Ads

Enhanced sitelinks offer additional options for ad extensions, allowing you to add even more valuable links to your ads for better user experience.

Enhanced sitelinks provide additional text under ads, making them more informative and engaging.

Google AdWords sitelinks are essential tools for advertisers, offering additional links that can drive more traffic to the relevant sections of your website.

Sitelinks are powerful. When you enter the top positions for AdWords, they will give you a massive CTR boost by taking up almost double the space of a standard ad on the search engine result page. Improved CTR’s lead to a quality score increase, which reduces your CPC. One of my favorite topics in the world of Google Ads is getting more clicks — in a higher position than your competition — for less!

We’ve been optimizing and auditing Google Ads campaigns for years, and have looked at 100’s of accounts. Imagine how many sitelinks that means!

Get your own action plan you can immediately apply to your Google Ads account for a better ROAS in the next 30 days.

Request a proposal

Click Through Rate Increase with Enhanced Sitelinks

 

Site link extensions in Google Ads are a powerful way to increase the space your ad occupies on the search engine results page, boosting its prominence.

When taking your ad copy and sitelinks pooled data, Sitelinks increase your CTR by 10-20%. You can measure your stats for each specific sitelink by segmenting the data on your sitelink extensions page.

One key insight about Google Ads sitelink usage is that underperforming sitelinks can lower overall ad quality, so regularly updating them with fresh, high-engagement links is essential.

You can see the massive difference in performance from one sitelink to the next. My first one (highlighted above) has a 0.11% CTR, and a 13.22% conversion rate – that’s higher than my normal ad copy! 

The “free shipping” ad extension only had a 0.01% CTR, and no conversions. This is a perfect example to always be testing. I’ll be pausing the “Free Shipping” extension for this ad group, as it doesn’t seem to connect with the audience.

Measuring Sitelink Performance

 

Alright, let’s break it down and get you measuring those sitelink performances like a pro. You’ve set up your sitelinks, and now it’s time to see how they’re doing. 

First things first, log in to your Google Ads account and head over to the “Ads & Extensions” tab on the left-hand menu. This is your command center for all things ad extensions. Once you’re there, click on “Extensions” to get a look at all your ad extensions in one place.

Now, filter this view to show only your sitelinks. Use the filter option and select “Sitelinks” so you’re only dealing with the data that matters right now. You’re looking at a list of your sitelinks and how they’ve been performing, but we need to go deeper.

Click on the “Segment” button and choose “This Extension vs. Other” under the “Click Type” segmentation. This will break down how many clicks each sitelink got compared to your main ad.

Pay attention to the key metrics:

• Click-Through Rate (CTR): This tells you how many people clicked on your sitelink versus just seeing it. Compare it to your main ad’s CTR. If your sitelinks have a higher CTR, they’re doing their job.

• Conversion Rate: This is the money metric. Look at how often clicks on your sitelinks lead to conversions. If one sitelink is driving more conversions, it’s a keeper.

• Cost Per Click (CPC): Check out how much you’re paying for each click on your sitelinks. If you’re getting a lower CPC with high conversions, you’re hitting the sweet spot.

• Impressions and Clicks: Look at how many times your sitelinks were shown and clicked. This gives you a sense of which sitelinks are the most popular.

This post is part of this series: .

Read more articles in the series

Always Test Your Sitelinks.

 

Adwords sitelinks are crucial for enhancing your Google Ads campaigns, as they improve visibility and provide users with a more detailed set of options to explore.

Your AdWords account has a lot of moving parts. It can be difficult enough for most businesses to test ad copy, let alone sitelink extensions. Simply having sitelinks will give your account a well-needed CTR boost, but optimizing your sitelinks will put you miles ahead of the competition. As you can see in the previous example, not every sitelink will perform well for you. I created the “Free Shipping” sitelink thinking it would garner huge CTR’s, but the audience was much more concerned (and ready to convert) when I served them the “Specials” sitelink.

Take the time to manage and optimize your account, and you’ll march towards higher CTR’s, lower CPC’s, and a cheaper cost per conversion.

We live, breathe & Dream Paid Traffic

Working with Search Scientists means you’ll get a team that shows up, works hard, and focuses on long-term, predictable revenue for your company.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are sitelinks in Google Ads?

Sitelinks are additional links shown beneath your Google Ad that take users directly to specific pages on your site — like a pricing page or a specific product category — instead of just your homepage. Each sitelink supports 25 characters of link text plus two optional 35-character description lines.

How do I add sitelinks in Google Ads?

Go to Assets in the left-hand menu of your Google Ads account, click the plus button, select Sitelink, and add your link text, description lines, and final URL. You need a minimum of 4 sitelinks for Google to serve them. See the full step-by-step walkthrough above.

Do sitelinks actually improve click-through rate?

Yes — sitelinks typically boost CTR by 10-20%, and on branded queries specifically, that lift can reach 20-30%. Most of that gain comes from the description lines, which advertisers frequently leave blank.

Are "ad extensions" and "assets" the same thing in Google Ads?

Yes. Google renamed "Ad extensions" to "Assets" across the Google Ads interface. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call, location, price, app, and promotion extensions are now all managed under the Assets tab — the features themselves didn't change, just where you find them.

How do I know if my sitelinks are actually working?

Segment your Assets performance report by CTR, conversion rate, CPC, and impressions for each individual sitelink — not just the campaign as a whole. If you're also tracking conversions properly, comparing sitelink-driven clicks against your conversion tracking setup will show you which sitelinks are actually driving results versus just clicks.

The post Google Ads Sitelinks: 25+ Examples That Convert (2026) appeared first on Search Scientists.

Howdy, Search Scientists friends! In today’s post, we are going to talk about Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs), Google Ads’ solution for you to increase your PPC campaigns’ reach and drive incremental volume to your website. 

We’ll cover a lot of things, including:

• What Dynamic Search Ads are
• How their targeting works
• Who should use them and what their benefits are
• DSAs optimization best practices and how to bid for this type of campaign
• Mixed or separate search and dynamic campaigns?
• We aren’t forgetting about Bing Dynamic Search Ads either

Let’s dive right in!

WHAT ARE DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS AND HOW DO THEY WORK?

Dynamic Search Ads (or DSAs) are a powerful way to find customers on Google, by targeting searches automatically, without keywords. Yes, you’ve read that right: without keywords. How does this work more precisely? Well, Dynamic Search Ads use content from your own website to target online users and deliver relevant ads and landing pages, based on their search queries.

Before we dig into the tactical steps behind creating and targeting for this kind of campaign, here’s a dynamic search ads example: Let’s say someone searches on Google for “flights to New Zealand”. DSA will respond to this specific query and show a tailor-made ad matching this particular search. Once they click the ad, they’ll land on the page with flights to New Zealand. This way, the path to conversion shortens.

THE DSA TARGETING METHODS

We won’t get into details on how to create this type of campaign as it is a very simple and fast process, but you can find all the steps on how to create a Dynamic Search Campaign in the Google Ads support pages.

Instead, let’s dig into the targeting methods of DSAs.

There are 5 DSA targeting options, ranging from tight URL control to targeting the whole website. Choose the one that is right for your business to get the best possible performance from Dynamic Search Ads.

1. Landing pages from your standard ad groups 
   • as it makes it easier to increase traffic on the webpages you’re already using in your accounts, Google recommends you start with this one. The downside of this option is that, depending on your keyword coverage, you might miss opportunities.
2. Categories
   • excellent option for crawlable, large websites, organized in a clear way by theme. You can decide which sets of pages to target and how to group similar pages. You can create separate ad groups for your main categories (auto-targets) and tailor your ad according to the content.
3. Page feeds
   
   • very useful when you have non-indexed websites and very large ones. It allows you to create a large set of URLs and pages to target. You can even label the pages and target the URLs with those labels only. Maintain the feed and make sure it’s accurate.
4. All webpages 
   • this option targets your entire website, providing the greatest reach. It is dedicated to advertisers with large websites, who are comfortable with automation, but it requires careful monitoring.
5. URL: URL is / URL contains
   • this option is suitable for advertisers who need more control for optimization purposes (eg. for specific promotions) and have non-indexed sites. Just keep in mind that, although you have more control, this option could limit your DSA’s potential.

We’ve been optimizing and auditing Google Ads campaigns for years, and have looked at 100’s of accounts.

If you want to get a fresh pair of eyes on your Dynamic Search Ads or any type of PPC campaign, go on and request a proposal made by our team of experts.

Request a proposal

WHO SHOULD IMPLEMENT DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS AND WHO SHOULD NOT?

As far as we’ve seen across the accounts we’re managing for our clients, Google Dynamic Search Ads would be most helpful for:

• Large brands with content-rich websites or any business who wants to maximize coverage of a diverse range of products. So, if you’re a huge e-commerce website, with lots of landing pages, go ahead and test DSA.
• Travel, retail and local businesses.
• Seasonal e-commerce websites – if you have a lot of changes in your inventory, DSAs will help you, so that you don’t spend extra time creating new ads.
• Any advertiser looking to find incremental value, any well-optimized account already successfully targeting high-volume generic keywords, wanting to cover any possible gaps.
• Advertisers who are just beginning with search advertising or don’t have time to manage search campaigns.

However, from our experience, DSAs are not that great for all websites.

As this type of campaign uses machine learning, which requires time, it is not suitable for websites with rapidly changing content, such as daily offers (except the case when you use feed-based targeting, which we mentioned above).

Another DSA setback is that they could show for less relevant traffic. So, if you don’t have a great website structure, it’s better not to use them yet, as it makes it hard for Google to crawl your site effectively.

SEVEN BENEFITS OF USING DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS

As for the advantages of using DSAs, here they are:

1. Spend less time configuring AdWords.
   • Better performance with minimal effort. These campaigns are easier to set up, maintain and optimize than the traditional keywords campaigns. With Dynamic Search Ads, you even skip doing keyword research.
2. Capture incremental traffic. 
   • Actually, this is the main benefit of Dynamic Search Ads. You’ll get more people coming to your site. 
   • According to IAB, there are 15% new search queries on Google every single day. That translates to more than 500 million searches that Google has never seen before. Capturing all that only with manual keyword work is a lot to struggle with. 
   • By using DSA you reach the full potential of your account because they capture additional traffic that might otherwise be missed by traditionally targeted keywords. In other words, you’re filling in the gaps.
3. Frequent automatic updates. 
   • Whenever you change anything to pages in Google’s index, they’ll crawl the website again to make sure that the ads are up to date. Isn’t that helpful?
4. Fair amount of control over your campaigns. 
   • You can decide whether or not you want to show dynamic search ads for a specific product page, for everything inside a category or the entire website.  
5. Tailored ad headlines for every search query. 
   • Google Ads dynamically generates a headline and chooses a relevant landing page.
6. Custom Display URLs.
   • You don’t have to choose a Display URL, nor paths. This one will be based on your final URL domain.
7. Performance.
   • According to Google, when compared to the average non-branded campaigns (broad match and phrase match keywords) across several verticals globally, the DSA campaigns delivered 15% more clicks, 30% higher CTR, 30% lower CPC and 35% lower CPA. So, why not test them and see how they work for you?

RECOMMENDATIONS AND BEST PRACTICES WHEN OPTIMIZING DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS

• Create at least 3 dynamic ads per ad group;
• Add all relevant extensions;
• Have a good description. You can’t control your headline, but you can control your description. So take time and really focus on writing a great description.
• Have a strong Call to Action! Make sure you also have one on your website in order to increase your conversion rate.
• Check the headlines. From our experience, sometimes Google DSAs could make pretty bad headlines.
• Combine DSA and RLSA. Layer your existing lists onto these campaigns to see better results. You could use the “All visitors” list as bid-only audience targeting, or apply granular remarketing lists with bid modifiers.
• Use negative keywords. You should definitely have a good negative keyword list. You can see the search terms’ performance that triggered your Dynamic Search Ads in the search term report and exclude the irrelevant ones that won’t bring you conversions, so you avoid wasted spend. 
  • Also, this report could work as mining for keywords expansion, or better new keywords discovery. These search queries weren’t triggered by your current keywords, meaning that you can add the high volume ones as keywords in your regular search campaigns.
• You can also start by targeting all webpages in a “Catch All” DSA campaign. This way you can see where most of your traffic comes from. Create this campaign to ensure the full coverage of your website, inventory, and any other search query not targeted in your category or keywords campaigns. You can leave it to run for a month and then have a look at the category and search query reports to create more granular campaigns based around categories.
• Identify the webpages that are low-performing or irrelevant and exclude them.
• Don’t set it and forget it!

BUDGET AND BIDDING IN THE DSA WORLD

Unlike the traditional campaigns, where you apply bids to the targeted keywords, here you set bids at the auto-target level.

Your DSA campaign’s daily budget should be at least 10% of the regular keyword campaign budget.

If using manual CPC, start with similar CPCs to your Broad Match Modifier or Phrase Match keywords. You could also use the bid simulator recommendations for each website category.

For an extra performance boost, automate your bidding with Smart Bidding strategies. As we mentioned in one of our previous posts, they take into account a wide range of real-time signals to optimize bidding towards conversions. We recommend using Target CPA, Target ROAS or Enhanced CPC.

DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS CAMPAIGN OR HYBRID CAMPAIGN WITH DYNAMIC AD GROUP?

There are two ways you can benefit from DSAs in your account: separate DSA campaigns or hybrid campaigns containing both search ad groups and dynamic ad groups. (You might already know that here at Search Scientists, we are fans of segmentation whenever possible.)

So how do you choose which one to use? Well, it depends on the strategy you have in mind.

On one hand, you can use hybrid campaigns, meaning mixed search and dynamic campaigns when DSA is an extension of your search activity and you have the same budget, bidding, and targeting.

On the other hand, you can use separate campaigns if you have different strategies: different budget, bidding, and targeting.

And now, let’s answer the question that’s probably on everyone’s mind: Is there any cannibalization between DSA and regular search ads?

Sorry to disappoint those of you who are bloodthirsty, but dynamic will trigger only if there is no other exact match keyword in that campaign or account to trigger the search query. Otherwise, DSA won’t enter that auction. However, Google may show the dynamic search ad instead of a broad match or phrase match keyword-based ad, if the first one has a higher ad rank.

Now, to keep a certain level of control, you could exclude all the other keywords in your account in the DSA campaign, so they don’t cannibalize. This way you really make sure that you’re using it only to find additional traffic and not steal it from your other campaigns.

DSAS, NOT ONLY A GOOGLE ADS THING - BING DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS

We cannot stress it enough. If you’re not running Bing, you’re leaving money on the table. If you’re profitable on Google Ads, chances are you’ll be profitable on Bing Ads, too. So — if you’re running PPC campaigns in Bing Ads, which we hope you do, go on and extend your reach with Bing Dynamic Search Ads.

Similar to Google DSAs, Bing Dynamic Search Ads will pull content, keywords, and key phrases from your website and use that to target your search ads. Once you set up your targeting, your ads will be created automatically; all you need to add is a description.

You can easily import your existing DSA campaigns from Google Ads or set up new ones in just a few steps, similar to the Google Ads experience.

Just keep in mind that Bing won’t scan your existing keywords inside the account, so you’d better add negatives in the DSA campaign for each and every keyword you are bidding on in your regular search campaigns.

At the moment, Bing DSAs are only available for advertisers in the US, UK, France, and Germany.

CLOSING THOUGHTS - Should You Try Dynamic Search Ads?

You might still be asking yourself if there is any reason to create Dynamic Search Ads if you already have carefully-written handcrafted ads that are performing well. In our opinion, yes! Dynamic Search Ads are a great way to supercharge your PPC campaigns. They can be really effective and drive an impressive incremental volume when they’re set up correctly. And that’s the main takeaway. So use them responsibly! They don’t compete with your Search, RLSA or Shopping campaigns; rather they complement them.

And that’s a wrap on Dynamic Search Ads! Now, go ahead, give it a try, see if they are a good fit for your business and let us know how it goes in the comments section below.  

If you’ve tested them in the past, you’d better test them again. Both Google and Bing have made updates to become more efficient.

You can also request a PPC proposal and we’ll help you with an action plan to immediately improve your PPC account for a better ROAS.

To keep up with other PPC expert tips, don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter.

Until next time, always be optimizing… dynamically 😉

FAQs about Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) in Google Ads: 

What are Dynamic Search Ads?

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are a type of Google Ads campaign that automatically generates ad headlines and targets based on your website’s content. Google matches relevant user queries to pages on your site.

What are the benefits of Dynamic Search Ads?

• Automatically targets new search queries.
• Great for websites with a large inventory.
• Saves time by reducing manual keyword setup.
• Generates dynamic headlines tailored to user searches.

How do I set up Dynamic Search Ads?

1. Create a new Search campaign.
2. Select Dynamic Search Ads in the campaign settings.
3. Enter your website domain or specific pages to target.
4. Write ad descriptions.
5. Set your budget and bidding strategy.

What targeting options are available in DSA?

• Targets the entire website.
• Focus on groups of products or services.
• Target specific landing pages.
• For example, pages with “sale” or “discount.”

Can I use DSA for an eCommerce store?

Yes, DSA is ideal for eCommerce, especially for large catalogs. However, for very large inventories, Google Shopping Ads might be more effective.

What are the limitations of DSA?

• Pages not indexed by Google won’t work.
• Less effective for sites with limited or generic content.
• Dynamic ads may not align perfectly with custom branding.

How do I evaluate the performance of DSA?

• Monitor metrics like CTR (Click-Through Rate) and Conversion Rate.
• Review the Search Terms Report to identify relevant and irrelevant queries.
• Track ROI and adjust bids accordingly.

How can I avoid irrelevant traffic with DSA?

Use negative keywords, limit targeting to specific pages, and frequently review the Search Terms Report to exclude non-relevant queries.

Here is an extensive list of Universal Negative Keywords that you will find useful. It contains 800 negative keywords that will very likely be irrelevant for your business.

I Want That List!

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The post Day 49 Of 100 Days Of Google Ads Help: Dynamic Search Ads – Supercharge Your PPC Account appeared first on Search Scientists.

In the complex world of Google Ads, understanding and managing default settings is not just a technical detail—it’s a critical factor that directly influences how your budget is spent and how effectively your campaigns perform.

These defaults act as the backbone of your account, automatically guiding bidding strategies, targeting options, and budget allocation across campaigns.

Ignoring or misunderstanding these preset configurations can lead to inefficient spending, missed opportunities, and ultimately, a poor return on your advertising investment.

Mastering how to review and adjust your Google Ads default settings empowers advertisers to take control, optimize ad delivery, and maximize every dollar spent—turning your campaigns from a cost center into a powerful revenue driver.

In this article, we will talk about:

The Critical Role of Default Settings in Google Ads

 

Google Ads is a powerful advertising platform offering a wide array of settings to manage your campaigns effectively.

However, one often overlooked aspect is the default settings applied automatically by Google Ads when you create campaigns.

These defaults fundamentally influence how your budget is spent, who sees your ads, and how your campaigns perform.

Understanding and actively managing these default parameters is essential to maximize return on investment (ROI) and avoid unnecessary spending.

When your ads appear for searches that are irrelevant, it's annoying, we get it. You can think of universal negative keyword lists like a permanent block list.

Request a proposal and we'll take an in-depth look into your account and give you suggestions on how to improve your conversions - including negative keywords.

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Default Bidding Strategy

 

Google Ads often assigns automated bidding strategies by default, such as “Maximize Clicks” or “Maximize Conversions,” depending on your campaign type and goals.

These strategies utilize Google’s machine learning to optimize your campaigns toward certain outcomes without manual intervention.

• Advantages: Automation simplifies campaign setup and leverages Google’s data to optimize bids for better performance.

• Risks: Default automated bidding may not align precisely with your unique business objectives or budget limits. It can lead to aggressive spending in competitive auctions or insufficient focus on high-value conversions.

Regularly review performance data and consider switching to manual bidding or hybrid strategies for greater control and efficiency.

Setting	Google Default	Recommended	Why It Matters
Bidding Strategy	Maximize Clicks	Target CPA or Manual CPC	Maximize Clicks prioritizes volume, not conversions — you pay for traffic that doesn't convert.
Geographic Targeting	Presence & Interest	Presence only	"Interest" targets users who searched for your location but are elsewhere — wasting budget on irrelevant audiences.
Ad Scheduling	All hours, all days	Peak conversion hours only	Running ads 24/7 burns budget during low-conversion windows — especially overnight.
Keyword Match Type	Broad Match	Phrase or Exact Match	Broad match triggers ads for loosely related queries, driving unqualified traffic and inflating costs.
Ad Rotation	Optimize for clicks	Rotate evenly (for testing)	Google's optimization limits your ability to A/B test ads fairly — newer ads rarely get equal exposure.
Device Targeting	All devices equally	Custom bid adjustments by device	If mobile converts at half the rate of desktop, equal spend across devices wastes significant budget.
Search Partners	Enabled	Disable until data confirms ROI	Search partner traffic often has lower intent and quality — include only after reviewing performance data.
Display Network	Enabled (in Search campaigns)	Disable	Mixing Search and Display in one campaign muddies performance data and misallocates budget.

Default Geographic Targeting

By default, Google Ads may apply broad geographic targeting settings to maximize reach, sometimes including locations outside your core target markets.

 

• Advantages: Wider reach can uncover untapped audiences.

• Risks: Ads might be shown to users in irrelevant locations, leading to wasted budget and reduced campaign effectiveness.

Refine geographic targeting by including only relevant regions and excluding non-performing areas based on conversion data.

Ad Scheduling and Delivery Method Defaults

 

Google Ads typically sets campaigns to run ads continuously throughout the day, distributing your budget evenly over time.

• Advantages: Ensures consistent visibility across all hours.

• Risks: Budget may be spent during low-conversion periods, reducing overall efficiency.

Analyze when your audience is most active or likely to convert, then schedule your ads accordingly to focus spend during high-impact time windows.

Keyword Match Types Default

 

Google often defaults to broad match keyword targeting to capture as much relevant traffic as possible.

• Advantages: Broad match keywords drive higher volumes of traffic.

• Risks: This can result in your ads appearing for irrelevant or low-intent searches, increasing cost without proportional returns.

Utilize more precise match types like phrase match or exact match and consistently add negative keywords to exclude irrelevant queries.

Ad Rotation Settings

 

The default ad rotation setting typically optimizes for clicks, prioritizing ads that get more engagement.

• Advantages: Quickly identifies which ads attract the most attention.

• Risks: This doesn’t always translate to conversions, potentially favoring ads that drive clicks but not meaningful business outcomes.

Manually control ad rotation or select “rotate evenly” during testing phases to measure true ad effectiveness based on conversions.

Device Targeting Defaults

 

Google Ads defaults to targeting all device types—desktop, mobile, and tablet—to maximize reach.

• Advantages: Broad device targeting ensures access to the widest possible audience.

• Risks: Your budget might be spent disproportionately on devices that perform poorly for your goals.

Analyze performance by device type and adjust bids or exclude devices that underperform to better allocate budget.

Step	Setting to Fix	Where to Find It & What to Change
1	Bidding Strategy	Campaign Settings → Bidding → Switch from "Maximize Clicks" to "Manual CPC" or "Target CPA" once you have 30+ conversions.
2	Geographic Targeting	Campaign Settings → Locations → Location Options → Change "Presence or Interest" to "Presence only".
3	Ad Scheduling	Campaign Settings → Ad Schedule → Review conversion data in Reports → Exclude low-performing hours and days.
4	Keyword Match Types	Ad Group → Keywords → Add keywords in Phrase ("keyword") or Exact ([keyword]) match. Pause all Broad Match variants.
5	Ad Rotation	Campaign Settings → Additional Settings → Ad Rotation → Select "Rotate Indefinitely" during testing phases.
6	Device Targeting	Campaign Settings → Devices → Set bid adjustments based on conversion data (e.g. -30% for mobile if it underperforms desktop).
7	Search Partners	Campaign Settings → Networks → Uncheck "Include Google search partners" until you've reviewed partner performance separately.
8	Display Network	Campaign Settings → Networks → Uncheck "Include Google Display Network" for all Search campaigns.

The Hidden Risks of Relying on Google Ads Default Settings

 

Using default settings in Google Ads, while convenient for quick campaign setup, carries significant risks that can negatively impact both budget efficiency and overall campaign performance.

Relying on these presets often means relinquishing granular control over critical factors such as bidding strategies, geographic targeting, keyword matching, ad scheduling, and device preferences, which may not align perfectly with your specific business goals or audience behaviors.

For instance, automated bidding defaults can lead to overspending in highly competitive markets without guaranteeing high-quality conversions, while broad geographic targeting may cause your ads to be shown to irrelevant users who are unlikely to convert, thereby wasting valuable budget.

Similarly, default broad match keywords can trigger your ads on unrelated search queries, driving unqualified traffic that inflates costs without meaningful returns.

The standard continuous ad scheduling can result in your budget being spent during hours of low user engagement or low conversion rates, diminishing the overall effectiveness of your spend.

Moreover, the default ad rotation that optimizes for clicks rather than conversions might prioritize ads that generate traffic but fail to deliver tangible business outcomes. Device targeting set to cover all platforms indiscriminately can cause funds to be funneled toward devices that do not perform well for your product or service, further eroding ROI.

Altogether, these default settings risk turning your Google Ads campaigns into inefficient spending machines, draining budgets without delivering proportional value, which ultimately undermines your marketing objectives and reduces the potential for sustainable growth.

This underscores the importance of actively auditing and customizing every aspect of your campaign settings to align with your unique business context and maximize the impact of your advertising investment.

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Who Can Benefit from Using Google Ads Default Settings

 

Google Ads default settings can be suitable for advertisers who are just starting out and need a simple, quick way to launch their campaigns without investing significant time in complex configurations.

Small businesses or individuals with limited marketing experience may find the automated defaults helpful because they rely on Google’s machine learning to optimize bids and targeting, which can deliver decent results without manual intervention.

Those with very limited budgets or resources might prefer defaults to avoid the risk of misconfiguring their campaigns.

Additionally, advertisers running short-term or experimental campaigns where speed and ease of setup are more important than fine-tuned control may also benefit from using default settings.

In these cases, defaults act as a practical baseline that allows campaigns to begin gathering data, which can later be refined and adjusted for better performance as experience grows.

However, while default settings offer convenience, they are generally less effective for advertisers seeking advanced optimization, precise targeting, or maximized return on investment.

INCREASE THE ROAS OF YOUR CAMPAIGNS IN TWO MONTHS.

Conclusion

Default settings in Google Ads serve as a convenient starting point but are not a “set it and forget it” solution.

They can significantly impact your campaign’s success, either boosting performance or silently draining your budget if left unmanaged.

A deep understanding of these defaults—and ongoing optimization—is essential to tailor your campaigns precisely to your business needs.

By customizing these foundational parameters, advertisers gain the control needed to reduce waste, increase efficiency, and transform Google Ads from a cost center into a powerful driver of growth and revenue.

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The post How to Manage Your Google Ads Account Default Settings appeared first on Search Scientists.

Many advertisers run themselves ragged A/B testing different creatives, ad copy, and identifying additional ways to better optimize ad performance.

But here’s what you need to know — while your creatives and copywriting do influence your conversion rate, it’s typically not as impactful as your targeting.

Enter custom affinity audiences (CAAs), the one tool that you can use to fine-tune your targeting, and boost your conversion rates.

Now, you probably already have your basic demographic targeting in place (location, gender, and all that good stuff). That’s great to start off with, but if you want to take your Google Ads to the next level, then creating custom affinity audiences is an absolute must.

In this blog post, we walk you through all you need to know about these audiences, including:

• What are CAAs
• How these audiences differ from affinity audiences and custom intent audiences
• Benefits of CAAs
• How to build CAAs

Ready? Let’s jump right in!

What are custom affinity audiences?

In a nutshell, CAAs are audiences that advertisers create to target groups of people with specific interests, intents, and demographic information. To create these audiences, you provide Google with information, including:

• Your audience’s interests 
• URLs (websites) that your audience is interested in
• Types of places that your audience is interested in
• Apps that your audience is interested in

Note that if you specify that your audience is interested in the Google Fit app, this doesn’t mean that your ads will show on this specific app. Instead, Google will look for users that have installed similar fitness-related apps on their phones, and show your ads to them. 

70% of consumers say ad relevance directly influences their purchasing decisions

3× higher engagement rates for custom audiences vs. broad predefined targeting

50% lower cost-per-conversion when audiences are matched to real intent signals

Custom Affinity Audiences let you combine interests, URLs, locations, and apps — the most precise audience segment available in Google Ads.

Custom affinity audiences vs. Affinity audiences vs. Custom intent audiences

CAA aside, there are also affinity audiences and custom intent audiences. These all sound pretty similar, so let’s take a minute to discuss them and map out their differences.

• Affinity audiences

Firstly, Google defines affinity audiences as audiences that are “built for businesses currently running TV ads” and those who “want to expand the reach of that campaign with an online presence.” 

Basically, these audiences are highly generalized TV-style audiences organized by their affinity. Affinity audiences include “Cooking Enthusiasts”, “Food & Dining”, “Travel”, and more.

As compared to affinity audiences, CAAs are more tailored; you can get really granular with these audiences, and dig deep to target your ideal customers. Here’s an example:

• Affinity audience = Sports Fan
• Custom affinity audience = Avid marathon runner

• Custom intent audiences

Custom intent audiences are audiences that allow you to segment ad groups according to the keywords and landing pages you would like to target. 

You can either rely on Google’s auto-created audience segments here, or create your own audiences by entering keywords, URLs, and apps related to your product or service. 

Once your ads and up and running, Google will serve them to consumers who are searching for the specified keywords or browsing the specified apps/videos. Note that custom intent audiences are only applicable to Display campaigns.

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Benefits of custom affinity audiences

CAAs bring about a whole host of benefits, including:

• Targeting on a more granular level
• Exercising creativity when it comes to targeting
• Targeting searchers who are more likely to convert

• More granular targeting

As we’ve mentioned previously, custom affinity audiences give advertisers the ability to get a lot more granular (as compared to standard affinity audiences).

If you can’t quite see this, here’s an example: instead of just tapping into the Cooking Enthusiasts affinity audience, a company selling baking paraphernalia might specifically want to reach customers who like to bake (and are willing to spend big bucks on their equipment). 

With CAA, the company might further define this audience by:

• Entering interests like “advanced baking recipes” and “advanced baking skills”
• Using URLs of websites with content about baking, including baking blogs
• Entering places that customers who like to bake might be interested in, like specialty baking shops 
• Entering apps that a customer who likes to bake might be interested in, such as apps that help you store and modify recipes, apps that provide measurement conversions, and more

• More creative targeting

Because CAA is so open-ended, this also gives advertisers the power to target more creatively. 

For instance, say Search Scientists wants to run a campaign to generate more leads for our company. Instead of just targeting consumers via basic demographics or the topics they’re interested in (bo-ring!), we can use CAA to target consumers that have attended relevant conferences and events.

Since we’re a digital agency, we’d want to reach out to folks who have attended digital marketing conferences such as Digital Summit DC. To do this, we can simply target the URL of Digital Summit DC, and add in other relevant interests such as “digital marketing”, “advertising”, “SEO”, etc. 

• Targeting searchers who are more likely to convert

Unless you’re running a branding or awareness campaign, you’re probably hoping to reach out to consumers who are likely to convert. Now, using CAA is a great way of doing that.

The key here is to target interests that are relevant to consumers who are further down the funnel, and more likely to use your product/service. 

For example, say you own a subscription box business, and you send out boxes containing dog products and treats. 

If you target the affinity audience “Dog Lovers”, you might not necessarily be reaching out to people who own dogs; you might also be serving your ads to people who simply love dogs, or love watching funny dog videos on YouTube.

Here, think of topics that would interest owners of dogs, but are unlikely to be relevant to those who don’t own dogs. For instance, you could use CAA to target interests such as “dog house training”, “dog behavioral training” and more. 

By doing this, you’ll be narrowing down your audience, and reaching out to consumers who are a better fit for your product. 

	Affinity Audiences	Recommended Custom Affinity Audiences	Custom Intent Audiences
Created by	Google	You (the advertiser)	Google or You
Targeting inputs	Predefined categories	Interests, URLs, locations & apps	Keywords, URLs & apps
Precision	Broad	Granular	Granular
Funnel stage	Top of funnel	Mid → Lower funnel	Lower funnel
Based on	Long-term interests	Niche behaviors & signals	Active purchase intent
Campaign types	Display, YouTube, Discovery	Display, YouTube, Discovery	Display only
Best for	Brand awareness at scale	Niche targeting + tailored messaging	Reaching active searchers
Example	"Sports Fan"	"Avid marathon runner"	Recently searched "running shoes"

How to build custom affinity audiences

Doing your research (and figuring out how you want to structure your CAA) is the tough part. Actually building your CAA, on the other hand, is easier than you’d think. Here’s a step-by-step guide that you can follow:

Step 1: Create a new Display campaign in Google Ads.

Step 2: Click on “Audiences” from the main menu.

Step 3: Click on “What their interests and habits are”.

Step 4: Scroll to the bottom, and click the “+” button to create a new CAA.

Step 5: Name your new audience and set it up with the specific interests, URLs, places, and apps that you want to target.

Step 6: Save your audience, and publish your campaign.

Pro-tip: If you’ve already created a CAA, and you want to use this in one of your existing campaigns, you can do this as well. Just go to that campaign, click on “Audiences”, and click on the Edit button to add a new audience.

Key Takeaways

Custom Affinity Audiences give you a level of control that Google’s predefined categories simply cannot match. Instead of picking from a generic list of interests, you are building the audience yourself based on real signals that matter to your business.

The real power comes from layering all four input types together: interests, URLs, locations, and apps. Each one you add helps Google understand your ideal customer more precisely. A baking supply brand is not just targeting “people who like cooking” anymore. They are targeting people who visit advanced baking blogs, search for specialty ingredients, and use recipe apps on a regular basis. That is a completely different audience and a completely different conversation.

Think about how your ideal customer behaves online rather than who they are on paper. Demographics give you a rough outline. Behavior tells you where someone actually is in their decision-making process. When you target based on what people do and consume online, your ads feel relevant rather than random.

This also changes how you write your ads. When you know exactly who you are talking to, you can speak directly to their situation. A tightly defined audience allows for tighter, more specific creative. That combination of precise targeting and tailored messaging is what drives stronger engagement and better conversion rates.

CAAs work across Display, YouTube, and Discovery campaigns, which gives you a lot of room to test different formats and see where your audience responds best. You are not locked into one placement type.

One thing worth remembering: the setup itself is quick. You can build a Custom Affinity Audience in Google Ads in under five minutes. The part that takes real effort is the research you do beforehand. Understanding which URLs your audience visits, which apps they use, and which interests actually signal buying intent is where the strategy lives. Get that right, and the rest follows naturally.

A final word on custom affinity audiences

At the end of the day, the goal is to ensure that your ad is as relevant to your consumers as possible. Once you achieve that, it’s half the battle won.

Now, that’s where CAA come in. You can use CAA to fine-tune your targeting and hone in on a highly specific segment. Now that you’re marketing to a specific segment, this allows you to tailor your ad to them, and make it more relevant. 

For those of you who haven’t experimented with CAA yet, go ahead and try these out! If you have any questions about CAA, hit us up in the comments below 👇.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use Custom Affinity Audiences in Search campaigns?

No. CAAs are available for Display, YouTube, and Discovery campaigns only. For Search campaigns, use Customer Match or In-Market audiences as observation layers to gather data without restricting your reach.

How many URLs or interests should I add to a Custom Affinity Audience?

There is no fixed rule, but 5 to 10 highly relevant inputs across different types typically produces the most focused segment. Avoid stacking too many broad inputs as it dilutes the precision that makes CAAs valuable in the first place.

What is the minimum audience size for a Custom Affinity Audience?

Google requires at least 1,000 active users before an audience becomes eligible for targeting. If your CAA is too narrow, add a few broader URL or interest inputs to expand reach while keeping the segment relevant.

Can I use Custom Affinity Audiences alongside remarketing?

Yes, and this is one of the most powerful combinations available. Layer CAAs on top of remarketing lists to reach new prospects who mirror the behavior of past converters, or use CAAs in observation mode to collect data before restricting your targeting.

How long does it take for a Custom Affinity Audience to populate?

CAAs are built on behavioral data Google already holds, so they populate immediately upon creation. There is no waiting period. You can add a freshly created CAA to a live campaign and start delivering ads right away.

Do Custom Affinity Audiences work with Smart Bidding?

Yes. When paired with Target CPA or Target ROAS, Google's algorithm uses CAA signals as additional context to optimize bids at auction time. This combination frequently outperforms broad targeting with Smart Bidding alone.

The post What Are Custom Affinity Audiences (+ How To Use Them To Fine-Tune Your Targeting) appeared first on Search Scientists.

That distinction sounds academic until you look at the numbers, and that’s where most ecommerce owners get fooled. Across the roughly 150 Google Ads accounts we audit every year at Search Scientists, Performance Max almost always reports a gorgeous 3–5x ROAS. The campaign looks like a hero. But when we pull the curtain back, a huge slice of that “performance” is your own remarketing and brand traffic being recycled: people who were already going to buy from you. PMax happily takes credit for the easy conversions and reports a vanity ROAS that has very little to do with whether you’re actually growing.

The question that matters isn’t “what’s my ROAS?” It’s “what is it costing me to acquire a genuinely new customer?” And that’s the number Performance Max is structurally designed to hide.

TL;DR: Performance Max is great at harvesting demand you already created (remarketing + brand) and dressing it up as fresh growth. Standard Shopping gives you the transparency and bid control to scale new-customer acquisition profitably. If your PMax ROAS looks strong but new-customer growth has stalled or your blended CAC keeps creeping up, it’s time to take the winners PMax found and rebuild them as Standard Shopping campaigns you actually control.

Performance Max vs. Standard Shopping: the core differences

Both campaign types can serve Google Shopping ads: the product image, price, and store name you see at the top of the results page. The difference is how much of the rest of the machine they drag along with them, and how much of it you’re allowed to see.

Does Performance Max include Shopping? Yes. Shopping is one of the placements inside PMax. When you run Performance Max with a product feed, it serves Shopping ads alongside Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps. Running PMax doesn’t replace Standard Shopping; it absorbs Shopping into a much larger, far less transparent bundle where you lose the search-term reporting and bid control a dedicated Standard Shopping campaign gives you.

Performance Max maximizes reach. Standard Shopping maximizes transparency and profitable control. The real question is which one you should be optimizing for at this stage of your growth.

Read that “Search-term visibility” row twice. The reason PMax is comfortable for Google and uncomfortable for advertisers is the same reason: you cannot see the search terms. You’re flying blind, trusting an algorithm whose incentive is to spend your budget, not to grow your business.

The hidden problem with Performance Max

We’re not anti-automation. PMax has a real job to do. The problem is that most stores treat it as the foundation of their ecommerce account when it’s really a testing-and-data-gathering tool wearing a foundation’s costume. Here’s what we see when we audit ecommerce accounts running PMax as their whole strategy.

1. It masks inefficiency behind a vanity ROAS

Performance Max is optimized to find the cheapest conversions available, and the cheapest conversions are almost always people who already know you. Returning customers. Cart abandoners. People searching your brand name. PMax scoops those up, reports them as conversions, and posts a 4x ROAS that makes the campaign look untouchable. None of that is incremental. You’d have gotten most of those sales anyway. The headline number is real; the implication that PMax caused the growth is not.

2. It doesn’t actually scale new-customer acquisition

Here’s the test that exposes it. Take a “winning” PMax campaign and double the budget. What usually happens? ROAS sags and the extra spend doesn’t bring a proportional bump in new customers. Why? Because there’s only so much warm, brand, and remarketing demand to harvest. Once PMax has milked it, more budget just hammers the same warm audiences harder. You’re paying more to reach the same people. That’s not scaling. It’s saturation wearing a growth label.

3. It steals attribution, and keeps stealing it

Because PMax runs on Display, YouTube, and Discovery, it inserts cheap impressions all over the buyer journey and then claims data-driven credit for conversions other channels actually earned. The nastier part: this doesn’t stop cleanly when you pause it. Because data-driven attribution learns from historical behavior, a recently-paused PMax campaign can keep siphoning credit during the transition period, which is exactly why a half-measure “wean off” approach makes your data unreadable.

The reframe we give every ecommerce client: treat Performance Max as a probe, not a pillar. It’s excellent at one thing: quickly telling you which products convert. Let it do that job, then take what it learned and build something you can actually steer.

When should you switch to Standard Shopping?

The honest answer comes down to data maturity. Use PMax when you have little conversion history and you genuinely don’t yet know which products sell. Its reach is a fast, blunt way to find winners. Switch to Standard Shopping when you have enough data to stop guessing and start controlling. Concretely, it’s time to make the move when you see these symptoms:

• Your customer-acquisition cost is unsustainable despite a strong PMax ROAS. The campaign reports 4x, but new customers cost more than their first-purchase value, because PMax is recycling existing demand rather than acquiring genuinely new buyers.
• New-customer growth is flat or declining as spend rises. You’re spending more month over month but the new-customer count is flat or shrinking. That’s the clearest sign PMax has saturated your warm audience.
• Efficiency collapses every time you scale budget. Each attempt to put more money into PMax tanks the return. That’s the textbook signal of audience saturation, not a scalable channel.

To be clear, we’re not anti-PMax. Performance Max is genuinely the right starting point for most new ecommerce accounts: if you have very little product-level conversion volume, you don’t have enough signal for tROAS to work reliably, and PMax’s broad reach is the fastest way to build it. What we’re against is treating PMax as a permanent foundation when your data is screaming that it’s time to take control.

One hard requirement before you switch: you need significant historical conversion data at the Product ID level. Standard Shopping’s smart bidding (and your ability to build a winners campaign) depends on Google knowing which specific SKUs convert. If your store is brand new with no conversion history, stay on PMax a while longer to gather that data first. The transition is for accounts that have earned the data, not accounts hoping to skip the learning phase.

A worked example: the $75 cart that “looked” profitable

Based on a home goods client we ran this transition for. The before/after figures below are illustrative placeholders; swap in the real numbers before publishing to make this a genuine, named-metric case study.

Picture a home goods brand with a $75 average order value and a typical ~60% gross margin (so roughly $45 of gross profit per order). It’s spending $20,000/month and PMax is reporting a clean 4.0x ROAS. On paper, a winner. Here’s what changes when you run the transition:

Per month	Before (PMax foundation)	After (Standard Shopping, ~3 months)
Ad spend	$20,000	$20,000 (held flat)
Average order value	$75	$75
Reported / blended ROAS	4.0x (PMax headline)	~4.0x blended MER (held)
New customers	~320	~450 (+40%)
New-customer CAC	~$62	~$44 (−29%)
Branded search clicks	baseline	+25%

Look at what the vanity ROAS was hiding. Same spend, and the headline return barely moved, but the metric that actually pays the bills (new customers) jumped 40%, while the cost to acquire each one fell by nearly a third. At a $75 cart with ~$45 of gross profit, the old setup was paying ~$62 to win a new customer: losing money on the first order and betting everything on repeat purchases. The new structure brought that down to roughly break-even on the first order, with repeat revenue as pure upside. And the rising branded search? That’s the top-of-funnel reallocation working, warming the market so more people come looking for you by name.

The framework: how to transition from PMax to Standard Shopping

This is the exact sequence we run when we move an ecommerce account off Performance Max as its foundation. Don’t freelance the order; the steps depend on each other.

Step 1: Steal PMax’s homework

Before you kill anything, harvest the intelligence PMax paid for. Open the PMax campaign’s product report and sort by conversions. You’re looking for the Pareto winners: the top 10–20 SKUs driving the overwhelming majority of your sales. These products have proven themselves; they’re the seed of your new structure.

Then cross-check the demand. In Audience Manager → Data sources → ecom_prod_id, look at your biggest remarketing lists (your data segments) and confirm the most-viewed and most-added products line up with those top converters. When your highest-traffic product IDs match your top sellers, you know exactly where the proven demand lives and which SKUs deserve their own campaign and budget.

Step 2: Kill PMax properly

Do not run new Standard Shopping campaigns next to a still-active PMax campaign and try to “wean off” gradually. Running both at once contaminates your attribution: PMax keeps claiming the easy conversions and siphoning data-driven credit, so you can’t read whether your new campaigns are actually working. (Google has since changed the old behavior where PMax automatically served over Standard Shopping for the same product; Ad Rank now determines which serves. Either way, the attribution contamination is reason enough to stop.) Pause PMax fully when you make the switch.

Brace for a messy transition. Expect roughly 1–3 months where the numbers look noisy as attribution re-settles and the new campaigns exit the learning phase. During this window, ignore individual campaign ROAS and judge the account on blended metrics: MER (marketing efficiency ratio) and true CAC. Those are the only numbers honest enough to tell you the truth while everything resettles.

The three-campaign structure

We rebuild Shopping as three campaigns, each with a distinct job. The structure isolates your proven winners from your experiments and keeps your brand traffic from inflating the wrong numbers.

Critically, use tROAS rather than Manual CPC for these campaigns. The whole point of Step 1 was to gather Product-ID-level conversion history during the PMax phase, and tROAS lets smart bidding leverage that history immediately, so you’re not starting bid optimization from zero.

Advanced (optional): tiered query sculpting

If you want surgical control over which campaign answers which query, you can sculpt with campaign priorities plus negative keywords. Set the Brand campaign to low priority with high bids, and the generic campaign to high priority with brand terms added as negatives. The result: a generic search hits the high-priority generic campaign first, but a brand search gets blocked there (brand is negated) and cascades down to the low-priority brand campaign. This is most effective with Manual CPC, where you control bids directly, and it’s overkill for most accounts. Reach for it only when brand and generic traffic are bleeding into each other.

Optimizing and scaling Standard Shopping

Rebuilding the structure is the start. The ongoing edge is in how you manage it, and this is the part PMax never let you do.

• Run aggressive negatives from day one. The transparency you just unlocked is worthless if you don’t act on it. Mine the search-term report constantly and cut irrelevant, low-intent, and off-brand queries fast. This is the single biggest lever Standard Shopping hands you back.
• Manage the Catch-All as an incubator. Watch the cold campaign for SKUs that start converting consistently, then graduate them into Best Sellers where they get a lower tROAS and more budget to scale.
• Loosen tROAS as returns stabilize. Once a campaign proves it can hold efficiency, gradually lower the target to unlock more volume. Tighten the target on anything drifting unprofitable.
• Use Click Share, not Impression Share, to find headroom. Click Share tells you what proportion of available clicks you’re actually winning, a far more honest growth signal than impression share. Pair it with search-lost-to-rank metrics to see where better bids or feed quality would buy you more of the clicks that matter.
• Reallocate freed budget to top-of-funnel. The whole point of leaving PMax is to stop overpaying for warm demand. Take the savings and push them into top-of-funnel channels like Meta to actually warm the market, which creates more branded and high-intent search later, making your Standard Shopping campaigns more efficient over time. Demand generation and demand harvesting are different jobs; stop asking one campaign to do both.

How to measure success (MER, not vanity ROAS)

If you judge this transition by the same vanity ROAS that hid the problem, you’ll panic in month one and revert. Don’t. Judge it on numbers that reflect the whole business:

• Total and backend revenue growth. Is the entire account, including repeat and organic-influenced sales, growing?
• New customer count. The number PMax was quietly failing at. This should climb.
• CAC and ACOS year over year. Compare against the same period last year to strip out seasonality.
• Brand-search growth. Rising branded search volume is proof your top-of-funnel spend is warming the market.
• Blended ROAS (MER) across the whole account. The single honest scorecard: total revenue ÷ total ad spend.

One mindset shift that trips people up: under data-driven attribution, your cold / non-brand Standard Shopping campaign will often get only partial credit and may report something close to a 1x ROAS in isolation. That’s fine. Expected, even. That campaign is a first-click feeder. It introduces new customers who later come back via a branded search where the profit actually stacks. Killing it because it “only” returns 1x is how you starve the top of your own funnel. Look at the whole machine, not one gear. For a deeper breakdown of which numbers actually matter, see our guide to the PPC KPIs worth tracking.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the main difference between Performance Max and Standard Shopping?

Standard Shopping serves Shopping ads on Google Search with full search-term visibility, campaign-level negative keywords, and your choice of manual or automated bidding. You can see and steer every query. Performance Max is fully automated, runs across all of Google’s networks, and hides the search-term report. The trade-off: PMax reaches further, but you lose the transparency you need to scale new-customer acquisition profitably.

Does Performance Max include Shopping?

Yes. When you run a Performance Max campaign with a product feed, Shopping is one of its placements: it serves Shopping ads alongside Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps. So PMax doesn’t replace Standard Shopping; it absorbs Shopping inventory into a much larger, less transparent bundle. The trade-off is that you lose the search-term reporting and bid control that a dedicated Standard Shopping campaign gives you.

When should I use Performance Max vs Standard Shopping?

The decision comes down to data maturity. Use Performance Max when you have little conversion history and don’t yet know which products sell. Its broad reach is a fast way to discover winners. Switch to Standard Shopping once you have that data and you’re seeing the warning signs: unsustainable customer-acquisition cost despite a strong reported ROAS, flat new-customer growth as spend rises, or efficiency that collapses every time you scale budget. In short: PMax to discover, Standard Shopping to scale.

Is Performance Max better than Standard Shopping?

Neither is universally better; they do different jobs. Performance Max is better for discovering which products convert when you don’t have much historical data. Standard Shopping is better for profitably scaling known winners with full transparency and bid control. Most mature ecommerce accounts are best served by Standard Shopping as their core structure, using PMax selectively as a discovery tool.

Can you run Performance Max and Standard Shopping at the same time?

Technically yes, but it undermines both. Running them together contaminates your attribution: PMax keeps claiming the easiest conversions and siphoning data-driven credit from your Shopping campaigns, so you can’t tell which is actually driving results. If you want to test or transition to Standard Shopping, pause PMax fully rather than running them side by side.

What happens to sales when you pause Performance Max?

Expect 1–3 months of noisy data as attribution re-settles and your new Standard Shopping campaigns exit the learning phase. Reported ROAS often looks worse at first because PMax was inflating it with brand and remarketing conversions. Judge the transition on blended metrics: total account revenue, new-customer count, and marketing efficiency ratio (MER), not campaign-level ROAS. Most accounts see a short-term dip followed by cleaner, more scalable growth.

What clients say

“Working with Search Scientists over the past few years has been a huge factor in increasing our leads.”
Mike Swigunski ★★★★★ (Google review)

“My experience with Search Scientists has been great.”
Michael O’Keefe ★★★★★ (Google review)

Google Ads Certified · Managing PPC for small businesses since 2011.

Want us to run this transition for you?

Moving an ecommerce account off Performance Max without torching your revenue in the process is delicate work. The wrong sequence, a premature scale, or a misread of the messy transition period can cost you a quarter of growth. It’s exactly the kind of restructure we run for ecommerce clients: stealing PMax’s homework, rebuilding into a controlled three-campaign structure, and measuring on MER instead of vanity ROAS.

If your Performance Max ROAS looks great but your new-customer growth has stalled, let us show you what’s actually happening under the hood. Grab a free Google Ads audit and we’ll tell you exactly where your spend is being recycled instead of growing your business. No obligation, just a clear read on your account.

The post Performance Max vs. Standard Shopping: When (and How) to Make the Switch appeared first on Search Scientists.

One reason pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has exploded as a platform is measurability. You have countless different metrics at your disposal that allow you to track and analyze accounts and campaigns from many angles. 

Although the sea of PPC KPIs (key performance indicators) available to evaluate is one of this strategy’s largest benefits, it can also be overwhelming. Understanding which KPIs are most relevant to your PPC success, indicative of your performance, and most likely to impact your bottom line can be a tough thing to do, especially when there are so many options to choose from.

There are many basic PPC KPIs to start with, like click-through-rate and cost per click for example, but if you’re ready to begin delving into more metrics, here are a few ideas.

1. Phone calls

A very natural result of the increase in mobile searches has been the growth in the number of calls attributed to paid search. Call-only campaigns, which appear on mobile phones, have a “call” button that appears on the right, while a call CTA along with a phone number shows as a headline. In industries that depend on a high volume of calls, these ads have proven fruitful.

Call-only campaigns measure the number of people who opted to call business as a result of viewing a paid ad. It can indicate how actionable the ad is proving to be in search. For businesses that use phone calls to generate leads or customers, it measures an important conversion action.

Action-based metrics are important to consider in your PPC campaigns because they indicate the number of people interacting with your ad, rather than just those who view them.

Phone calls can be an overlooked opportunity, as it does require a little bit of setup. If advertisers want to add call extensions and report specifically on this activity, it is necessary to do this manually within Google Ads.

As today’s consumers use their smartphones and mobile search to perform a vast number of activities, call-only campaigns are likely to become more popular. For this reason, phone calls will become a more important KPI metric to track.

2. Impression share

In online advertising, an “impression” is made each time an ad is shown on a search results page or a display ad. Impression Share indicates the number of impressions you’ve received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Eligibility is based on your current ads’ targeting settings, approval statuses, bids, and Quality Scores. You can view impression share data at the campaign, ad group, and keyword levels. 

Impression share often falls under the radar, but it’s a great KPI to measure the strength of your keyword set. If your impression share is high, it’s a great indicator that you have strong keyword coverage. Impression share works best after a campaign has gone through its early stages and has already played the field with many keyword variations. Once you see which keywords are resonating, then it’s time to track your impression share to achieve a higher scale.

However, if you have a low impression share, it can negatively impact the rest of your PPC metrics. Impressions occur early on in the online marketing funnel. If people aren’t served your search or display ads, there will be no ad clicks, which can affect the impact of your online advertising campaigns. That’s what makes impression share such an important PPC KPI and part of the campaign success.

More on why impression share is important There are two reasons why your impression share isn’t as high as you’d like it to be.

3. Conversion volume

Conversion volume, or the number of users who convert during a certain period, tracks the health of your campaign. It refers to the total number of conversions or monetary value of conversions in a given time period.

A conversion can be a “macro-conversion”, like transactions, revenue, or leads, but it can also be a “micro-conversion” like the number of newsletter signups, video views, or file downloads. A lack of growth here means your campaign needs some serious adjusting.

In Google Analytics, conversion volume is called “Goal Completions.” When using goals in Google Analytics, goals can be categorized into four types:

• destination goals
• duration goals
• pages/screens per session goals
• event goals. 

As Optimize Smart says, conversion volume is an accurate reflection of a campaign’s statistical significance and effective reach and is more “optimizable” than conversion rates. You can start by examining and expanding your keyword pool, for one suggestion.

Even a modest increase in conversion volume can have a major impact on the campaign’s results. Increasing conversion volume is the easiest way to grow the return on investment of your campaigns. In particular, if you can improve your conversion volume while maintaining or decreasing your cost per acquisition, you can start generating more revenue from a smaller investment (a digital marketer’s dream!). 

4. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

The Cost per Acquisition KPI measures how cost-effective your PPC campaigns are when it comes to generating new conversions for your sales team. The purpose of this metric is to provide your marketing team with a tangible dollar figure so they understand how much money is appropriate to spend on acquiring new conversions, whether this means leads, product sales or a micr0-conversion, like the ones I talked about above.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to minimize the cost per acquisition. However, be sure to compare it with your total amount of conversions. A low CPA, with a high volume of quality conversions, is a good indicator that your campaign is doing well. If your CPA is too high and conversions are too low however, continuing the campaign is extremely difficult to justify.

These are just a few of the PPC KPIs you should be tracking in your campaigns. Be sure to consistently evaluate each of these metrics (and the others you choose to monitor) to determine how valuable they are to you and your business goals. 

KPI	Healthy Range	Red Flag	Affects
Phone Calls Volume of inbound calls from call-only or call extension ads	Call rate > 5% Avg duration > 60s	High clicks, zero calls Short calls (<15s) — wrong audience or weak ad copy	→ Conversion Volume → CPA (if calls = leads)
Impression Share % of eligible auctions where your ad actually showed	IS > 70% for brand IS 40–70% non-brand	IS < 30% Lost IS due to rank — signals Quality Score problem	→ Conversion Volume → Phone Calls (reach)
Conversion Volume Total completed goals: purchases, form fills, sign-ups, calls	CVR > 3–5% (search) CVR 1–3% (display)	CVR < 1% High traffic + low conversions = landing page issue	→ CPA directly → Budget allocation
Cost Per Acquisition Total spend ÷ total conversions; the ultimate efficiency metric	CPA < 30% of margin CPA at 30–50% of margin	CPA > 50% of margin Spending more to acquire than the customer is worth	→ Budget decisions → Bid strategy adjustments

How These 4 KPIs Flow Into Each Other

Impression Share → Phone Calls & Traffic → Conversion Volume → CPA

Low Impression Share means fewer people see your ad — limiting call volume and conversions before you can optimize. Fix IS first, then focus on conversion rate to bring CPA down. Chasing CPA on a campaign with 20% IS is like optimizing a funnel that's barely open.

Marie Johnson

Marie is a contributor to Enlightened Digital, UX Designer and technology writer from New York City. If she's not writing her latest blog post in her kitchen, you'll likely find her strolling through Central Park, cappuccino in hand.

The post 4 PPC KPIs to Measure in Your Campaigns appeared first on Search Scientists.

As a PPC agency, it’s easy to see from the outside what our clients are struggling with when they come to us. 

Take a sneak peek at the signs that it’s time to outsource your PPC management:

• PPC account growth – too big to manage
• You want to try something new with paid traffic
• Your competition is growing
• You don’t have the time to manage your own PPC

Video Transcript

I talk to people every week about why it might be time to hand over their paid traffic management to us, the experts. Something many of them struggle with is a reluctance to let go of overseeing the accounts themselves. 

While it’s true that if your campaigns are small or just starting out, we recommend that you take the reigns in those early times, but there comes a time to relinquish control and choose a PPC agency (Moz has a helpful article on this topic). It doesn’t have to mean an admission of defeat. On the contrary, it means you’ve done something right!

Let’s look at some of the reasons you might want to hand things over.

In-House vs. Agency vs. Freelancer: Which PPC Model Actually Works?

Before deciding whether to outsource your PPC, you need to understand what you’re actually choosing between. Most business owners frame this as a binary — “do it myself or hire someone” — but there are three distinct models, each with a completely different cost structure, risk profile, and performance ceiling.

An in-house PPC manager is a full-time employee dedicated to your ad accounts. They know your brand deeply, sit in your meetings, and respond to changes immediately. The catch is that one person can only know so much — they typically master one or two platforms, rarely have time for proactive testing, and when they leave, they take all institutional knowledge with them.

A PPC agency brings a team: a strategist, a copywriter, a data analyst, and often platform specialists. You pay for access to that collective expertise, cross-industry benchmarks, and redundancy if one person leaves. The tradeoff is that you’re one of many clients, brand immersion takes time, and communication runs through an account manager rather than directly to the person touching your campaigns.

A freelancer sits in the middle — typically one specialist charging less than an agency but more flexible than hiring in-house. They work well for single-platform accounts with predictable volume. The risk is the same as in-house: one person, one point of failure.

Factor	In-House Manager	PPC Agency	Freelancer
Monthly Cost	$4,000–$8,000 (salary)	$1,000–$5,000 + % of spend	$500–$3,000 flat
Platform Expertise	1–2 platforms	Google, Meta, Amazon, Bing	1–3 platforms
Scalability	❌ Limited	✅ High	⚠️ Medium
Brand Knowledge	✅ Deep	⚠️ Takes 1–3 months	⚠️ Variable
Turnover Risk	⚠️ High	✅ Low (team backup)	❌ High
Response Time	✅ Immediate	⚠️ 24–48 hrs typical	⚠️ Variable
Best For	Enterprise, $500K+ spend	Growth-stage, multi-channel	Small budgets, 1 platform

The Real Cost of Managing PPC In-House (Most Businesses Get This Wrong)

The most common mistake business owners make when evaluating in-house PPC is comparing the agency fee to the salary alone. That comparison always makes in-house look cheaper — and it’s almost always wrong.

A PPC manager earning $65,000 a year costs you roughly $5,400 a month in salary. But that’s not what they cost. Add employer payroll taxes (7.65%), health insurance, paid leave, and any performance bonus, and you’re already at $7,000–$8,000 per month before they’ve opened a single campaign. On top of that, a professional PPC manager needs tools — keyword research software, bid management platforms, A/B testing tools, and reporting dashboards — that typically run $300–$1,200 per month depending on account complexity.

Then factor in recruitment. The average time-to-hire for a PPC specialist is 6–8 weeks, and job board fees, recruiter commissions, and onboarding time add up to roughly $5,000–$10,000 per hire. Amortized over a year, that’s $400–$800 per month in hidden hiring cost — before you account for the revenue lost during the gap between one manager leaving and the next one reaching full productivity.

The table below shows what in-house PPC management actually costs versus what most businesses think it costs.

Cost Category	Monthly Estimate	Commonly Overlooked?
PPC Manager Base Salary	$4,500–$7,500	❌ No — this is the only number most people see
Payroll Tax + Benefits	+20–30% of salary	✅ Almost always missed
PPC Tools & Software	$300–$1,200	✅ Frequently missed
Training & Certifications	$100–$400	✅ Frequently missed
Recruitment (amortized annually)	$400–$800	✅ Almost always missed
Lost Revenue During Ramp-Up	$500–$2,000 est.	✅ Almost never counted
Total True Monthly Cost	$7,000–$13,000/mo	vs. agency retainer at $1,500–$5,000

7 Signs You Should Outsource Your PPC Right Now

Most businesses wait too long to outsource. By the time they make the call, they’ve already burned months of budget on a stagnating account, lost ground to competitors who moved faster, or watched a key employee walk out the door with everything they knew about the campaigns.

The signals below are concrete and measurable. If you recognize three or more, the math on outsourcing almost certainly works in your favor.

Your cost per acquisition has risen three months in a row. This is the clearest performance signal there is. A rising CPA in a stable market means optimization has plateaued — the person managing the account has run out of levers to pull. A fresh team with cross-account benchmarks will typically find headroom within the first 60 days.

You’re spending more than 10 hours a week on campaign management. As a business owner or marketing director, your time has a dollar value. At 10 hours a week, you’re contributing the equivalent of a quarter-time employee to PPC alone — time that isn’t going to product, sales, or strategy. A specialist does in two hours what takes a generalist ten.

You haven’t run a single A/B test in the last 60 days. Ad creative fatigues fast. CTR drops quietly over weeks, and most self-managed accounts don’t catch it until spend efficiency has already deteriorated significantly. Systematic creative testing is the first thing that gets deprioritized when someone is managing PPC alongside other responsibilities.

You’re only running ads on one platform. If your competitors are on Google, Meta, YouTube, and Bing while you’re running Google Search campaigns only, they are capturing your audience at every stage of the funnel while you’re only showing up at the bottom. Expanding platforms requires both the expertise to set them up correctly and the bandwidth to manage them — which typically means it’s time for a team.

Your average Quality Score is below 6. A Quality Score under 6 means you’re paying a cost-per-click premium compared to better-optimized accounts in your auction. Google rewards relevance — tighter ad groups, stronger landing page alignment, and higher CTR all drive Quality Score up and CPC down. Recovering a poor Quality Score is a structural project that requires dedicated time and expertise.

You cannot explain your ROAS by channel. If you know your total ad spend and total revenue but can’t break down performance by campaign type, platform, or audience segment, you don’t have attribution — you have aggregated data. Without channel-level visibility, every budget decision is a guess. This is a systems problem that agencies solve on day one of onboarding.

Your PPC manager just gave notice. This is the highest-urgency scenario on the list. When an in-house specialist leaves, campaigns don’t pause — they continue spending while performance silently degrades. The 6–8 week hiring gap, followed by a 4–6 week ramp-up for the new hire, represents months of suboptimal performance. An agency can be onboarded and operational in 1–2 weeks.

Warning Sign	What It Signals	Urgency
CPA rising 3+ months in a row	Optimization has stalled — fresh expertise needed	🔴 High
10+ hours/week spent on PPC	Owner time cost exceeds management fee	🟠 Medium
No A/B tests in 60+ days	Creative fatigue is silently eroding CTR	🔴 High
Running ads on only one platform	Competitors are capturing your audience elsewhere	🟠 Medium
Average Quality Score below 6	You're overpaying per click vs. optimized accounts	🔴 High
Can't explain ROAS by channel	No attribution = every budget decision is a guess	🔴 High
PPC manager just resigned	Institutional knowledge walkout + 3-month performance gap	🔴 Critical

Account growth - too big to manage

So you started out on a shoestring budget and only had 2 or 3 campaigns to start.  Then you added in some new PLAs. You heard about the glory of remarketing, and started some remarketing campaigns.  Someone sent you a blog post on the importance of negative keywords, so you’re combing through your search queries to add those in manually.  

The list just goes on and on, because there’s just so much you can do inside your accounts as they grow and change.

You want to try something new with paid traffic

Maybe you saw a YouTube video on Advanced PLA structures or want to start retargeting to Facebook to capture a new audience. Did you hear about call tracking and how that can help you more accurately track conversions? Is it time to expand to Bing, Instagram, or test the waters on LinkedIn?

There are limitless avenues for you to take your paid search – do you know how to implement all these new ideas you have for your campaigns?

Your competition is growing

It’s so easy to start an ecommerce store these days. When you first started out, you were the only one selling at home solar panel kits, and now there’s 6 million Google search results for your product. What are you doing to get ahead of your competition? 

Beyond having an excellent landing page and working on your SEO, you need to be on top of your PPC game and have a complete strategy for staying ahead of your competition and in front of your customers.

You don’t have the time to manage your own PPC

We know better than anyone – good PPC takes time! It’s the reason that it’s the only thing we do at Search Scientists. A well managed account takes a lot of watchful management:

• Going in and looking for new keywords
• Testing ads
• Finding negative keywords
• Bid optimization
• Looking for areas of wasted spend
• Analyzing test results

You might be at the point where the time involved is just too much. You’re out in the world running a business, talking to employees, developing a customer base, customizing your products, talking to manufacturers, and dealing with software glitches. You may be in school or working another job or walking your dog or trying to get through a lengthy novel – and just don’t have the time to properly manage all the aspects of your digital marketing accounts to keep them healthy and profitable.

Wrap-up

Whether your campaigns are getting too big to handle, you’re trying to choose some new techniques, your competition is biting at your heels, or you simply don’t have the time for it any longer, handing over your accounts to a team of proven professionals could be just the thing you need to push your campaigns to the next level and start seeing a real return on your ad budget. And you’ll have more time for all the other things in your life that you enjoy.

Are you feeling your competition close? Or is the lack of time making you think of outsourcing your PPC? Let us know in the comments below what is the most stressful part for you when it comes to PPC management.

Stay tuned for Jessica’s next installment, where she’ll go over some of the many benefits of hiring a professional to manage your PPC.

If you’re curious whether your campaigns are ready for professional management, request a proposal to find out.

The post Outsource PPC or Manage In-House? The 2026 Decision Guide appeared first on Search Scientists.

Do you need Facebook Advertiser access to your client’s account but find yourself overwhelmed when it comes time to do it? Granting the access can feel intimidating if you don’t know your way around. While it might feel like wandering around a Minecraft world, don’t panic! We’ll give you the map to requesting access to your client’s account.

How to Request Advertiser Access on Facebook

You might be desperately combing through the Facebook help files in search of a step by step guide to requesting access, but there’s no need with this easy to follow guide.

Step 1 - How to Request Advertiser Access on Facebook

First, navigate to the Business Settings.

Find Accounts and then choose Pages. Now, select Request access to Facebook Ad Account ID. You will need to enter the ad account ID to request access.

If the client is unsure of what their Account ID is, they can find it by signing into Facebook Ads Manager and selecting Settings from the dropdown menu. Next, they’ll click Share the Facebook Ad Account ID.

After you make your request, the client should receive a notification. If that doesn’t happen, they should recheck the Ad Account ID for any pending requests in the Ad Account Roles section.

After the client has granted you access, you still have a few steps left. First, you will visit Business Settings again. Look for Accounts. Click the Add People button and add yourself as the admin.

Need Access to the Facebook Page Too?

Being granted advertiser access doesn’t give you access to make edits to the Facebook Business Page itself. It’s like one of those infomercials “but WAIT, there’s more!” To have the ability to this requires a different kind of access. To start the process, your client will click Settings at the top right while logged into their business page.

Now go to the left side of the page and find Page Roles. Click it, and you’ll be brought to a new screen where you can add people to your page.

In the middle of the screen, you’ll find the Page Roles section. Be sure to provide the client with the email address you’d like added. The email needs to be typed into the Page Roles section and then they’ll have to select the person in the drop-down that appears. Click on the dropdown to the right of the box that says Editor, choose the most appropriate page role and click Add. At this point, the client will be asked to enter their password.

From here, you – the advertiser – will be sent an invite you will have to accept before you can access the page. If you’re unsure of the page role your client should assign to you, you can learn more about Facebook page roles in the help section.

Trying to figure out how to get access to an account can be a struggle if you aren't familiar with the platform. But when you have someone to show you the way it isn't so intimidating anymore.

Request a proposal (don't worry - there are no strings attached) and get your own personalized guide on how to improve your PPC.

Request a proposal

Step 1.5 – Requesting Advertiser Access AND Facebook Page Access (All in One Place)

Before you can successfully run ads, you don’t just need advertiser access—you also need access to the actual Facebook Page. Think of it like being given the keys to the advertising engine (Ads Manager), but still needing permission to sit in the driver’s seat (the Page itself).

The good news? You can request both access types in a streamlined process through Meta Business Settings.

How to Request Advertiser Access AND Page Access

Start by heading into Business Settings inside Meta Business Suite. Once inside, follow these steps:

1. Go to Accounts → Ad Accounts
   
   • Click Add → Request Access to an Ad Account
   • Enter the Ad Account ID provided by your client
   • Select your role (usually Advertiser or Analyst)
2. Next, go to Accounts → Pages
   
   • Click Request Access to a Page
   • Enter the Facebook Page name or URL
   • Choose the appropriate permission level (typically Advertiser access with content/ads permissions)

At this point, your client will receive a notification to approve both requests.

Once submitted:

• The client must approve access from their Business Settings → Requests tab
• You may also see pending approvals under Business Settings → Requests Sent
• After approval, both the Ad Account and Page will appear in your Business Manager dashboard

Advertiser access alone does NOT allow you to:

• Post or edit content on the Page
• Manage Page settings or messaging
• Run full-funnel campaigns that require Page-level permissions

To fully manage ads, you need both:

• Ad Account access (for running ads)
• Page access (for connecting creatives, engagement, and identity)

Without both, you’ll constantly run into restrictions—even if your ad account access is correctly set up.

Step 2 - Facebook Pixel Creation

Now that you have Facebook advertiser access, you’ll need to create the Pixel (if one doesn’t already exist). The Pixel will allow you to track a variety of actions on the client’s website including visits from users who click your links on Facebook, those who initiate checkout or complete a designated action.

Since you will be managing the client’s account, it’s best to create the Pixel through Business Manager. Remember, only account admins can create Facebook Pixels which makes completing Step 1 essential.

To create the Pixel, start by signing into Ads Manager. Next, click the gear on the top right side of the screen. This is the Business Settings.

On the left side of the screen are several bold menus with dropdowns. Click the dropdown arrow for Data Sources and select Pixels.

Click the blue +Add button next to Pixels.

A box will pop up and ask you for some information. Name your Pixel in the Pixel Name box. Then, enter the website URL in the box with the same name and click Create.

Installing the Pixel

When you click Create, you’ll be brought to a new screen with instructions to install the Facebook Pixel. You can choose from several options, such as connecting a platform like Google Tag Manager, Shopify, Big Commerce, or Wix. In addition, you can also get the code to install manually or email the code to a developer so they can install it for you.

Once you’ve installed the code, you’ll need to set up the events. They work hand in hand like runners in a relay to measure your goals and conversions. Facebook will ask you to choose the industry that best fits what you do, so they can offer you the events that are best suited to your industry. Click the dropdown and set up the events you’d like to track.

Verify the event setup by scrolling down and clicking the green button labeled Test Event Setup. When you’ve verified that your events work properly, click Done.

Pixel access

If you’ve created the Facebook Pixel yourself, then you already have access to it, and you’re covered. If someone else has created the Pixel, you’ll need to make sure you have access – if you’ve been properly added as an admin you will be able to navigate to the Pixel(s) from the Business Settings. You’ll find it under Events Manager. Here, you’ll see the Pixel and its activity.

You’ll also be able to find the Pixel ID. Make a note of the ID so that you can verify the correct Pixel is on your client’s website. Then, click Detail.

This will bring you to the Pixel and events setup where you can get the installation information for the Pixel or set up the events you’d like to track.

Facebook Pixel Helper

We suggest you get the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome Extension. This handy little tool will assist you in confirming the Facebook Pixel is firing correctly. You can also check to see that your events are firing. You can review the custom parameters, load time, and more. It takes the guesswork out of Pixel verification.

Step 3 - Facebook Catalog Creation and Access

You’re in the home stretch now! You’ve requested and been granted Advertiser access, you’ve created a Pixel, and now you need to create the Product Catalog (if the client sells products). The first thing you should know is that the Facebook Pixel must be installed before the catalog can be set up.

You may or may not be familiar with what a product catalog is. A product catalog allows you to upload all of your products and information about them. Once you do this, you can use the product catalog to create dynamic ads, open a Facebook shop, tag products on Instagram, and generate regular Facebook ads and posts.

Product Catalog Setup Via Plugin or Integration

There are two possible ways to upload your product catalog. The way you upload your catalog depends on the platform you use for your website. If you’re using Shopify, Magento, WordPress, or another content management system, you should check to see if there is an integration that will upload your catalog for you.

Manual Facebook Catalog Setup Guide:

If a plugin or integration isn’t available for your website setup, then you’ll have to manually set up your Facebook Product Catalog. This can be done by going to the Business Settings in Ads Manager. From the dropdown menu, select Catalogs from under the Assets column.

Once you’re in the Catalog Manager, click the blue Create Catalog button.

Review the steps for creating a catalog by following the prompts. First, you’ll choose your industry – E-commerce, Travel, Real Estate, or Auto. At this point, the directions will vary slightly based upon your industry, but you’ll want to choose a manual upload since you don’t have an integration to use. When you do this, you’ll either upload individual products one at a time or add products in bulk.  

When you’ve finished, click Create Catalog. Now you’re all set!

Troubleshooting Advertiser Access and Pixel Creation

From time to time, you may run into trouble. When things don’t go as planned, the best place to start is the Facebook Business Ads Help Center. If you still can’t find an answer, or all efforts have failed, try contacting support. While things generally go smoothly, you never know what may come up.

With everything created and access granted, you’re ready to create your first ad set. Now that you have access to your client’s Facebook Ads account, you can go on and learn strategies to make your ads successful!

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You may have looked at your website’s analytics data lately and found a frustrating trend. People are visiting, but they’re not filling out your lead form, calling, or buying. On the surface, you feel like your website is compelling, helpful, and to the point, but it’s just not converting. A low website conversion rate means your site isn’t doing its job, but how do you fix it? Many digital marketers turn to the principles of conversion rate optimization; Moz suggests to identify friction points and transform passive browsers into active customers.

You need conversion rate optimization or CRO! 

Read on, we’re talking about seven valuable strategies that you can use for improving your website’s conversion rate.

What is a Conversion, after all?

As you know, a conversion is when someone performs a goal action on your site. Most of us think about conversions in terms of bottom of the funnel conversions like a purchase, phone call, or form fill. The truth of the matter is a well-rounded marketing strategy has conversions that are appropriate for every step in the funnel. They can run the gambit from a small action like a newsletter signup to a large action like a yearlong subscription.

Micro-Conversions Versus Macro-Conversions

Not all conversions carry the same weight. Just like everything else in life they come in all sorts of sizes. Conversions are measured based on intent, and micro-conversions have less importance than macro-conversions.

Think about a micro-conversion as a low commitment action. Signing up for a newsletter or watching a video on your site are great examples of this. It’s basically a step on the way to completing your primary goal – gaining a lead or customer.

A macro-conversion, on the other hand, is the whole enchilada – the thing you’re going for. A macro-conversion is a purchase, an appointment, or lead form submission. It’s a more significant commitment, a bigger ask of the user.

OKAY, So What is MY WEBSITE Conversion Rate?

Now that you know what a conversion is, you might want to know how to find your website’s Conversion Rate. You can do this by using a little math. 

Conversion Rate = Conversions ÷ Sessions/Users (number of visits/users to the site) X 100.

What is CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization?

Moz defines CRO as:

"the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise. The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what's stopping them from completing your goals."

In layman’s terms, it’s figuring out why someone doesn’t do what you’d like them to do on your website. It may sound easy, but it requires systematic testing and data analysis to produce results.

Getting Started with Conversion Rate Optimization

Not seeing the numbers you’d like to see? It doesn’t matter whether you want to completely overhaul a page or your whole website or just tune up a page. 

The strategies you’ll use will be the same no matter how big, or small your job might be. The process is a lot of educated trial and error while analyzing your data, and sometimes even enlisting outside opinions to improve the user experience.

Begin by Setting a Baseline

First things first, you need a baseline before you can do anything. Much like you step on a scale before going on a diet, you should check your site’s vital stats before trying to make changes. Take a full assessment of your Google Analytics (or other tool you might use) from bounce rate to time on site. Take a peek at your attribution model as well, and make sure it’s right for your business model. It doesn’t make sense to try to improve things before you know what needs to be improved.

Now that you’re not flying blind, you can choose which metrics to focus on for your strategy and testing.

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CRO Strategy 1 - Try a Custom Landing Page

The term landing page gets thrown around a lot these days, but in essence, a landing page is the page people end up on when they click on some form of marketing. This marketing can be an email, a social media post, or some type of paid search or paid social marketing. If you’re sending your marketing traffic to a regular old page on your site, you should consider a custom landing page.

These landing pages come with many benefits. You can take away all distractions like navigation, and ensure they’re laser-focused on your campaign’s goal. There are also other fantastic options like dynamic keyword insertion, so visitors can see their queries in the page content. Customization can be used to tailor your content to the user. When it comes to paying for traffic, you should think strategically about where you send it.

A/B Test your Landing Pages

Possibly the best option afforded to you by using a landing page to improve your conversion rate is A/B testing. Using a landing page will allow you to test different page variants with a test element. For instance, no one can help but click that big red button, right? Maybe… but let’s prove with data that your big red button works better. A/B testing page elements like button color, call to action, and certain offers will allow you to uncover the best combination for the highest conversion rate.

Behind the scenes tip: Google Optimize is an awesome free tool for A/B testing your landing pages. We’re probably optimizing our SearchScientists.com pages with Google Optimize as you’re reading this sentence.

CRO Strategy 2 - Simplify Your Navigation

There are many things you can do to optimize your website for conversions. Something many people tend to overlook is the navigation. If a user can’t find what they want, then there’s no way they’ll ever convert. Simplifying the navigation can go a long way towards increasing leads or purchases.

How many levels deep does your navigation go? If your navigation feels like Dante’s Inferno, you’re doing it wrong. Sure, you don’t want to create pages that are too long, but 10-level deep navigation doesn’t serve anyone either. The best way to lay things out is to make it an intuitive, simple path.

CRO Strategy 3 - Test Colors

Don’t let anyone tell you color doesn’t matter. Could you eat in a pink dining room? How about an orange bedroom? Okay, well maybe some of us can tolerate that, but not all of us. Do you have an established color palette? If not, now is the time to establish one. Take some time to learn more about color theory.

 

Think about your Call to Action buttons too. You’ll want to make them stand out. They should say “click me!” Remember, the objective is to make someone want to perform your goal action.

CRO Strategy 4 - Try Video

Try a change of pace with video. Impactbnd offers some stats that no business can afford to ignore, like:

● 72% of businesses say video has improved their conversion rate.
● 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions
● 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video.

What all of these numbers really mean is that using video is likely to have a positive impact on your conversion rate. 

Video offers an explanation of your words and breaks up the endless sea of characters on the page. Much like images, it provides a much-needed respite as well as more information. You can show your product in use, offer additional details, show testimonials, or give product instructions. Remember, your video should remain short – 2-3 minutes – or you will have defeated the purpose of using a video.

[Speaking of video, the Search Scientists YouTube channel is full of goodies and waiting for you to subscribe ;)]

CRO Strategy 5 - Calls to Action

Are you telling your users what you’d like them to do? You’ve spent all of this time making your website look fabulous and improving your user experience, but have you told your users what you’d like them to do?

Wait! Before you say “yeah, my form says ‘Submit’,” stop yourself right there. It’s not compelling or exciting. Sure, it’s an action in the verb sense, but that’s about it. An appropriately-worded Call to Action could raise your conversion rate by more than 83%, according to Neil Patel. More importantly, it’s about psychology. We act on things because something drives us to do it. Plain and simple.

CRO Strategy 6 - Social Proof

Social proof has many forms, but we often see it as things like testimonials and product reviews. This proof connects people with your brand and instills trust. According to VWO, “70% of consumers say they trust opinions posted online.” Think about these social proofs as a form of personal referral for the modern age.

CRO Strategy 7 - Tweak Your Copy

Passive copy is boring and unengaging. Same as your ad copy, your website copy needs to have a specific structure to be effective. It should be short, easy to read, and broken up with plenty of headlines that allow for scanning. It shouldn’t contain a lot of unfamiliar jargon or complicated words. 

All of your essential should be above the fold so that someone can find what they are looking for what they need quickly. Your copy must be benefits-focused, illustrating why prospective customers need your product or service. You want to convey facts, but you’ll need to become a storyteller.

CRO Strategy 8 – Guide the Eye, Lead the Journey

Picture this: You’re browsing an art gallery. Each piece has been carefully curated, strategically placed to catch your eye, guiding you from one masterpiece to the next.

You move effortlessly through the gallery, fully immersed in the experience. The art speaks to you because the journey is seamless.

Now, imagine your website as that gallery. Every element, from headlines to images, plays a role in guiding the visitor’s eye.

 

When you think about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), it’s easy to get caught up in technical details—A/B testing, metrics, and heatmaps. But at its heart, CRO is about storytelling. 

Start with your layout.

• Where do you want your visitors to go?
• What do you want them to do?

Each choice, from the size and color of your buttons to the placement of your calls to action, should guide the eye in a way that feels intuitive.

Think of it as setting up a trail of breadcrumbs—a gentle, almost subconscious nudge in the right direction.

The content you choose to highlight is equally important. Your most compelling offer, your strongest testimonial—these should stand out, drawing the eye just as a spotlight draws attention to a piece of art.

Conversion Rate Optimization - Constantly weigh performance against data

Strategies to increase conversions are systematic and can be done on specific pages or across a whole site. They employ a mix of creativity and data analysis. Success isn’t measured by some arbitrary number; instead, you set your own goals based on metrics that make sense to your organization.

At the end of the day, you might ask yourself, “what does CRO mean?” The answer doesn’t have to be complicated. Conversion optimisation means the design of your website or landing page isn’t set in stone. You need to always be testing it, and weighing its performance against the data. Tools like Google Analytics, UserTesting, and Hotjar are your friends. Guesses are just too costly in the CRO marketing business. If you make a user want to take an action, really crave it, they will.

Now that you’re armed with the strategies, go start optimizing your website!

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Request a proposal and we'll also review your PPC landing pages and offer ideas on how to improve them for a better CRO.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

CRO is the process of improving your website or landing page to increase the percentage of visitors who take a specific action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.

Why is CRO important for my business?

CRO helps you maximize the value of your existing website traffic by converting more visitors into customers, leading to increased revenue and better business performance.

How do I know if my website needs CRO?

If you’re getting traffic to your site but not seeing enough conversions (sales, sign-ups, etc.), it’s a sign that your site may benefit from CRO.

What are common elements to optimize in CRO?

Common elements include headlines, calls to action, page layout, forms, images, and overall user experience.

How long does it take to see results from CRO?

The time to see results can vary, but many businesses start noticing improvements within a few weeks to a few months after implementing CRO strategies.

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The post Conversion Rate Optimization: <br>How to Go from Bounce to Sale appeared first on Search Scientists.

If you manage ads for an e-commerce business, you’re probably always searching for new ways to get your ads to stand out. Competition can be fierce, and any way to attract more attention to your ads without increasing your budget is worth considering.  If you’re already using Shopping Campaigns, then you’ll be excited to learn more about Showcase Shopping Ads which allow your products and your brand to appear to users in new ways.

Table of Contents

What are Showcase Shopping Ads

Showcase Shopping Ads are a way to give users a catalog of your products rather than just one product. They give you the ability to show several relevant results and “showcase” several products to users who have expressed shopping intent. 

Showcase Shopping Ads allow you to advertise on the Search Network like Product Shopping Ads do, but lets users click to expand your selection and browse without ever leaving the page. They also appear at the very top of the page above everything else.

It’s fantastic because we all like choices, and being at the absolute top of the page guarantees attention.

How Do Showcase Shopping Ads Work?

A user searches a broad term like “patio chairs,” triggering your ads to serve at the top of the SERP (search engine results page). Your ad displays your products and their prices, just like product shopping ads. You also have the ability to use video, rather than an image in the ad.

When someone clicks the ad, it expands – a feature that’s not available in product ads. When a user clicks it, the ad expands to show your catalog, and if they click again, they arrive on your landing page.

The coolest part is the first click is free! Users can click to expand your ad and see your products without navigating away from the SERP.

Google Showcase Shopping Ads Implementation

Showcase Shopping ads are easy to implement in just a few clicks and create a significant impact. If you want more interaction with your ads and to improve your opportunity to sell products by giving searchers options, then you’re using the right ad type.

How to Set Up Showcase Shopping Ads

Interested in creating Showcase Shopping Ads for your business? You can start either one of two ways. Either create a brand new Shopping Campaign or create a new ad group in an existing Shopping Campaign. We suggest you choose the method that fits best with your current account structure.

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Creating Your Ad Group

Once you’re decided, navigate to the ad group tab in a Shopping Campaign and click the blue plus button to add an ad group. Select the type of ad group, Showcase Shopping, and name your ad group. Now choose a cost per engagement bid for your ad group and enter it.

Google charges per engagement for this type of ad rather than per click, since some are free. Google defines engagement for Showcase Shopping Ads as, “Expand the ad and spend 10 seconds within the ad or clicks before 10 seconds have passed.”

From here, select which of your products you want to appear in your ads. Use your product groups from your Merchant Center create your ad group. The process is similar to the way ad groups are constructed in Shopping Ads. When you’re finished, click Save and Continue.

Constructing Your Showcase Shopping Ads

After you create the ad group, follow the guide to construct the ad creative portion of your ad group. Start by uploading your header image or video. Since you’re advertising a group of products, the image needs to be representative of the whole group and/ or your brand. 

At this point, you have the option to generate copy for your ad. It is an optional part of the process, but it never hurts to tailor your ads to your audience using all of the tools at your disposal. There are both headline and description lines that can be customized. 

The last step is to preview your ad on the right side of the screen. Make any needed edits, then click Save and Continue. Your ads will then be reviewed, and they should be ready to run in about 72 hours.

The required image and character specifications exist in the Google Ads Help article on Showcase Shopping Ads.

Who Can Use Shopping Campaigns?

While we wish everyone were eligible to use Shopping Campaigns, there are some requirements barring entry. You need your Merchant Center set up and linked to your Google Ads account. You’re also obligated to keep your product feed up to date by submitting your feed at least every 30 days. Additionally, your product data needs to comply with all Google Shopping Policies, which includes product restrictions, adherence to website standards, and conducting a type of business that is not banned or restricted on the network. 

Bidding Options for AdWords Shopping Showcase Ads

Remember the days when manual CPC and automated rules were the only options you had? Your bid strategies won’t be that limited with this campaign type. You can choose from 3 strategies. They are:

• Target ROAS (return on ad spend)
• Maximum CPE (cost per engagement)
• Maximize clicks

Where Will My Image Header Appear?

Image headers can appear in a couple of places. You may see it at the top of your expanded ad after an ad click. If the image is the best match for a search query, the image header can show up in your ad before someone clicks. Another possibility is that your image header won’t appear but your product images will instead. Google will show the image that’s most relevant to a user’s query.

What are the Most Important Metrics?

All campaigns have a set of core KPIs. What are the predictors of success for your ads? The number one set of metrics to consider when analyzing the performance of Showcase Shopping Ads is engagement. While conversions are always ideal, this ad type isn’t geared towards the bottom of the funnel acquisition.

Your top metrics for these ads are engagements, average cost per engagement, free clicks, and average cost per engagement. In some ways measuring engagement over conversions may seem counterintuitive, but the objective is to gain brand recognition and engagement. 

Shopping Showcase Ads Best Practices

As with all advertising, there are some best practices you should follow to make your ads more successful. A critical one for Shopping Ads and especially for this type of Shopping Ad is to use the highest quality image available. Your product images should also provide a relevant, seamless experience. You wouldn’t wear ripped jeans to a formal wedding. Likewise, you wouldn’t use a blurry, dark, or blurry photo.

Another best practice is to always use pictures that are free from watermarks, logos, borders, or anything else that detracts from the product itself. You should also ensure there is no excessive whitespace or cropping.

Product photography is an integral part of your success, but so is your campaign structure. Don’t use your “all products” group for these ads. Instead, group your products by broad themes like summer dresses or running shoes.

The last thing you want to consider is creating a funnel. Showcase Shopping Ads target broad, non-branded keywords, which tend to reach people who are still researching. You should mix your Showcase Ads with regular (more purchase intent driven) Shopping Ads to structure a full-funnel strategy. 

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Optimizing Your Shopping Showcase Ads

After a few weeks, you’ll find it’s time to begin optimizing your campaigns. There are various ways to do that. One such way is to A/B test your feature images against videos. Google allows you to use a feature video in your ads for a more interactive experience, so why not see how it affects your performance?

Product group structure is another area that can be optimized. Start with broad product groups like “summer clothes.” Then create more specific product groups like “summer dresses” and “men’s shorts.” Don’t stop at product group inclusions. Create exclusions that help tighten  your product groupings and ensure the most suitable products show for a query.

Your bids are another place where you can make adjustments to improve your performance. Keep your bids low for searches that don’t have high buying intent. Raise your bids as they show more intent down the funnel with your highest bids placed on high buying intent keywords.

Don’t forget the only visible part of your campaigns when optimizing is your ads. In general, you should start with two to three ads. Test elements of your ads like descriptions and headlines one at a time. Since there are no calls to action in these ads, you’ll need to make sure the other elements speak for you.

The Benefits of Using Showcase Shopping Ads

As with anything in life, it’s hard to put effort into something that doesn’t give you much of a return. The benefits of implementing Showcase Ads exist on several levels. First, they serve as a branding mechanism on broader search terms. They also prequalify users at no cost to you (free first click) by allowing them to expand your ads and decide whether or not what you offer is right for them.

You gain the ability to appear for broad searches and get in front of more people. However, don’t let the term “broad” fool you. The real magic here is being able to tailor the product selection someone sees when they expand your ad. For example, you can create ads with the latest trends and seasonal favorites for a “men’s pants” search. An ordinary shopping ad doesn’t give you that kind of control. Lastly, engagement metrics help you get an accurate picture of how your products and ads are received. It’s probably as close to mind reading as you’ll ever get for the early stages of an eComm campaign, so it’s a fantastic way to start things out.

Summary

Showcase Shopping Ads offer a unique way to present your products in a visually engaging format, ideal for capturing the attention of potential customers at the start of their shopping journey. By displaying multiple products within a single ad, you can highlight your brand’s range and create a more immersive experience. This ad format not only boosts brand awareness but also allows you to attract high-intent shoppers at a lower cost per click compared to traditional shopping ads. For businesses looking to stay competitive in the e-commerce landscape, Showcase Shopping Ads provide an effective tool to drive traffic and inspire purchases.

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